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What Kind of Books do You Want?
ctrimble asks: "I'm the acquisitions editor for a technical publishing company (not the one with the animals, but we have had six of our books reviewed favourably, here on Slashdot) and part of my job is to determine what books my company should publish. This consists, mainly, of me sitting in my apartment eating peanut butter sandwiches, reading Slashdot,
and writing perl scripts that generate titles in a Madlibs type fashion: "Hacking Ruby for Midgets" (forthcoming in July). Unfortunately, there's a bit of an impedance mismatch between my methodology and filling the needs of the programming community. Market research is tough to do in tech books since you need to forcast about a year in advance. So, let me pose the question to you -- what kind of books do you want? What spots do you see as needing to be filled? For that matter, do you even want dead-tree books, or are eBooks and/or online documentation sufficient?"
I love dead tree programming books. And O'Reilly is the only one who seems to deliver the kind of books i like. I don't want to reference a book on a secondary monitor. :/
i'd be perfectly happy with 'hacking ruby for midgets'.
I much prefer reading off of dead trees, as opposed to the CRT.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
Anything that's well written is better than anything that's not, no matter what languages they cover and what ones you're using. As long as you have a decent function reference for your language, the rest is all programming theory anyway.
Nope, no sig
Add some porn to your tech books and you will have a #1 hit.
Michael Loves Me!
For you comment on us wanting dead tree books, I vote yes. I like being able to make notes in the margins, highlight, etc., and taking a book places is usually easier than a laptop or pc.
On a side note, ancedotes are good. Most topics are usually pretty dry, so adding in a little humor can make the books more fun.
thanks
Sent from your iPad.
There's something comforting in having an open book next to the keyboard. I'd love a book on programming for the upcoming KDE3 and/or a book on Qt3.
What kind? Zope, and other web application servers are an area of interest. Hmmm, sorry, can't think of any other interests that aren't met by the Books With The Animals On The Covers. Heck, I've got 5 of those within arms reach right now.
Best Slashdot Co
Programming KDE
Programming Gnome
Perl 6, it's not your father's Perl
Ruby, for exceptionally tall people
Linux kernel, line by line
Programming C#
Programming for Mono
AtheOS, line by line
Embedded systems in C
And so on and so on.
Dancin Santa
Moderators: That is a joke.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
a nice Linux book which covers administering OpenLDAP would be great. and please, dead tree, dead tree. when the server is down, you need a dead tree to read. when the server is up, you don't need a book.
-rp
I would like something like a text book: 50 java problems. Each chapter a short problem that requires some java hacking to do, and then at the end each problem coded out. So you could hack through it and then read good reference code about a problem with which your are familiar.
I use java as an example, but I really would like it in all languages.
I'm not sure if online "books" are a good reference. But take PHP's web site, it is TERRIFIC for finding information about programming. It is thorough, with examples of everything. I think a lot of languages could use resources like that on the web too, and it would be nice to have one central location for a series of languages. I know there are some decent sites out there, but I haven't found one that has really stuck out as being a really good programming reference site for "all my needs".
Or at least one with heavy input from him.
It doesn't matter *what* topic. Whatever he wants you to write about.
He can talk about hardware design.
Software design.
Cross platform design.
Optimization.
Algorithms.
Graphics trends.
Project management.
Racing.
I'd be interested.
GPL Deconstructed
I have only ever bought one thing from the animal publisher, and that was perl stuff. They are good books.
.Net book).
I also have an ebook from microsoft in chm format for MFC that has been quite helpful for my MFC class.
An oracle book in pdf format has been almost as useful too.
The kinds of books I would like are programming books that are similar to the animal books in how they are written. Maybe use plants (invision... a venus fly trap on the cover of a
Give the option of buying the dead tree book or ebook. Always put the ebook in the dead tree book too.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
we have had six of our books reviewed favourably, here on Slashdot.
Uhm, links?
Why all the secrecy?
I don't see either co's name or one single link in the whole article, or the section marked "links" that appears next to it as a slashbox...
~
Support the AC initiative. Copy this message when posting insightfully or wittily as AC.
I'd like a book on how to forecast the needs of the technology sector about a year in advance. ; )
Mr. Ska
Complete, dead tree, references work the
best with a quick paced tutorial.
mb
I don't know about anyone else, but I would really like to see a 1 or 2 volume set on the various components of the jakarta project and how they fit together, especially in a practical enterprise.
I'm getting tired of having to choose between a $75 book with 1200 pages and a $70 book with 1150 pages. Whatever happened to concise text? Doesn't anyone at the publisher actually try to carry these monsters around any more? Let's get back to basics and not have any more of these 2 kilogram wonders with 18 faces on the cover....
I'd like to see some more clearly written, in-depth books on streaming media administration, particularly on-the-fly encoding and distribution using Windows 2000 Server as the platform. PS e-books suck! : )
Some of my best research is done while I'm on the john. I can sit and relax and go through a reference manual without any interuptions. My wife won't let me take a computer into the bathroom to do research.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
i want books in both dead tree AND electronic format. why not bundle a nice CDROM with the book which gives it in an easy electronic reference ? im paying 50 bucks for the book...do me a favour and slip it in a $1 cdrom too.
I love the dead tree editions. Online manuals (the PHP manual is the best example i've seen) are fantastic, but only when i'm sitting at the computer online.
There are lots of times when i just want to see some good examples of code use, and that can be really hard to find online.
plus, i don't have a network connection in the bathroom...
I would like to see some more in depth books about programming, bioinformatics and statistics. So far, the only books out there - that I know about - are pretty basic.
A book on how to configure management would be useful. By "configure management", I mean:
-describe typical management structures
-explore how decisions are made
-attempt to aggregate and parametrize hierarchical processes, such that one can start referring to them by their "Pattern"-name shorthand.
-discuss what the managed can and cannot do to influence these decision-making structures.
Remain calm! All is well!
1. Teach yourself ANSI Common LISP in 24 hours.
2. The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Linux Kernel Internals.
3. Assembly language for Dummies
4. Giving yourself a Enterprise Java Enema.
And I know it's not easy. First off, Dead Tree is good. sometimes just a break for the eyes, sometimes just the security of knowing it won't go down.
What I want is the Linux Application Guide. Basically, a book that says "Here are the major Word Processors. These are the key features of each. We suggest you decide based on whether you need to do this, that or the other." Ditto browsers, Desktops, mail clients, DVD players, Instant Messaging, p2p.
Basically, I use Linux. I use KDE because I tried it and I like it. pine because I tried it and liked it. Ditto Konq, Kword, mplayer, and others. They may or may not be the best there is. They're just the first I tried that was good enough. So... help me pick my applications.
I know you don't write the books... but I've been waiting for that book, and haven't heard anything about it. I know there are problems -- time frame, distro, etc. Just try to make it distro-independent, maybe list easy distros for each app. Also, it would need a brief bit about configuration. I'm thinking two to three pages per app plus a couple screen shots. Order of five to ten apps in less than a dozen categories.
...is a book on how to convert a Windows user to a *nix user, and vice-versa. Not just how to convert the box, but everything someone would need to know to make the transition quick and easy (commands, if you use this app in Windows then you're gonna want to use this app, etc.). I think this would come in especially handy if you included info for sysadmins on how to convert networks.
Maybe I'm wrong and there's already a good book out there like this.
Hey, since I suggested this, do I have the intellectual property rights for the book? Woohoo! Royalties!
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
What *I* want are "pocket" ie small books with clear-cut examples of useable code. I switch between Perl, C, C++, Java, etc all the time, and it get frustrating when you forget a certain syntax or way of doing something. Either ONE book with lots of basic syntax examples, or many small books for each language!
I know LOTS of CS students who would buy them.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
I would like to see a book on some of the Jakarta projects, specifically: Ant, Velocity, and Turbine.
also a book about JUnit, especially if you can tie it in with Ant, etc, using real examples of setting it all up.
and again, dead tree, please, until that whole 'digital paper' thing pans out.
-rp
Short, specific, inexpensive, and if it claims to teach me anything in 24 hours, 1 week, 1 month, or even in 10 easy steps I'm not going to buy it.
If it claims to be a "Bible". I'm not going to buy it.
If it has source code it had better come with a CD or a link to a well-designed and fast web site.
If it doesn't have source code, I'd rather save $5 and not get a CD instead of getting a CD with demo software that is already 6 monthes out-of-date by the time the book is published.
Also, any book that begins with a "history of the computer" introduction goes back on the shelf down at Borders.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
is an old cliche...so I don't think 1200 page books are exactly a new innovation...although O'Reilly seems to avoid it most of the time.
What is your Slash Rating?
1. A book on how not to smash the SCO box in the next room with an axe whenever I type in a command that is supposed to be there, that there is a man page for, yet the command comes up not found.
2. A book on why I suck at the Debian installs.
Also, dead trees please. I dun wanna get caught without an O'Reily refrence at some point because I'm a dumbash and forgot to replace/recharge the batteries on my palm. Books never run low on batteries.
I personally still find dead tree books preferrable to any e-books that I've experienced. I think mostly it's to do with the fact that my largest monitors are only 17" and that just doesn't cut it for relaxed viewing with a full page displayed in a decent font.
I wonder if there are physiological limits to vision/comprehension that have pushed us toward the current sizes of books (apart from the fact that we can't see in infra-red and with greater acuity!). I remember reading about "saccades" which are apparently the chunks of text-lines that our brains like to take in at one go (revealed through studying people's eyeball movement: it happens in discrete jumps across the text instead of being a smooth word-to-word progression).
Also, if I'm buying an e-book I expect it to be significantly cheaper due to the fact that the distribution costs are lower and I can't use it on the bus, or at the coffee-shop (my laptop screen is even smaller and the battery goes down after 2.5 hours!)
I'd like to see texts which addressed specific topic areas (say, database programming) in a language-independant way. You could have a couple of languages in the book, and then allow users to contribute examples in the same structure as the book (i.e. same examples) on the web.
You could also host discussion boards structured the same way as the book so people can ask for help and submit updates as they appear.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
called Teach Yourself Teaching Yourself In 21 Days In 21 Days
please, dear god, offer RING BOUND versions of your books! I really don't understand why this isn't a common thing, especially among technical references. Standard bindings do not hold up to the abuse that my books take, and are especially annoying if I am trying to work on a piece of code while keeping a reference book open at the same time. Ring bindings allow for books to lie flat on a desk, instead of flopping closed. To get the same effect from a normally bound book, you practically have to break the binding.
Just a thought. I'd probably own more books if they were just easier to use while doing actual work.
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
I am an avid consumer of tech books. I buy about 1 a month or more, at $50+ a pop.
Whatever subject I am currently interested in gets my money. Lately it's been OpenGL and game programming (especially math). In the last 3 months I've purchased or recieved for X-mas (by request):
OpenGL Game Programming
Programming Linux Games
3D Math For Game Programmers
Physics For Game Programmers
Tk/TCL For Real Programmers
3D Game Engine Design
DNS and BIND
SSH (the O'Reilly one)
Game Programming Gems 2
and a few more.
So, what am I looking for?
It depends what I am interested in today. Right now I need a really good C++ STL reference book.
I also need a math primer. I haven't thought about math since my aborted attempt at college 12 years ago. While I did get an A in Calculus, that was 12 years ago and I remember nothing. The 3D Math book I mentioned above pretty much assumes you already know Calc.
It seems to me that there are alot of beginning programming books, especially about game design and C++, but few advanced books.
Also, there are few game AI books out there, but I see on Amazon that there are 2 promising titles to be released in the next few months.
One of my favorite programming books of all time is The Perl Cookbook. Now, I make my living programming Perl on Linux, and this book gets cracked open by me at least once a week. I've even seem comments in other people's code that said "If you don't understand this next bit, see the Cookbook page xxx". A Cookbook type thing for C++ would really be cool.
Alright. Lunchtime. Off to Fry's.
-geekd
The Java Cookbook sounds like what you are looking for. I own it and really enjoy it.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
I typically despise reading books in electronic format, unless it's for the explicit purpose of performing searches to locate specific content.
I spend all day at work in front of computers, and feel like my eyes need a rest by the end of the day (and during the day if I'm reading the book at work).
As for what content I'd like to see ---- That's difficult to say, except to express my general opinion that technical books should strive to be more example-oriented ) in the future. (I.e., a "hands-on" approach, as opposed to intangible theory / textbook like crap.
Finally, I really like technical books that include a CD with a fully searchable electronic version of the text (so that I don't have to schlep the book around with me all the time with my laptop).
although slightly off-topic, i would love a book that i could lie flat on my desk...
I prefer to keep all of my documents as PDF files and the simply print the pages as I need to read them. I see printers as temporary display devices. That way, I can print something and just throw it out when I'm done reading it and still have an original copy on a hard disk drive for reference. I mostly just do this with data sheets and computer manuals.
I would like to read "Programming For .Net and J2EE in Python". A step by step guide to writing enterprise software that runs on both frameworks, and therefore multiple platforms, unchanged. Or failing that, the equivalent book for java.
I'm a Lisp programmer (Allegro CL mostly), so naturally I would like to see more books covering Lisp. I'd specifically like to see the following topics covered:
I'd really like to find more practical Lisp examples on bookstore shelves.
Oh, and before I hear "Lisp can't do that", here's a short list of Lisp success stories:
Essential C++ by Herb Sutter.
The comp.lang.c++.moderated newsgroup ran a series of problems from the moderately thoughtful to the downright fugly, entitled "Guru of the Week" and contributed to by the best of the online C++ community. About 50 of the GotW article were then pulled into a book and published.
For C++ in general, get everything (right now, about 8 books) from the new "C++ In-Depth" series. Stroustrup is the series editor; Essential is one of the titles. The idea behind the series is to get away from the massive 1200-page MFC tomes meant solely to generate revenue for the publisher; all books in the In-Depth series must be less than 300 pages long (main body). Short, clear, and to the point.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Dead tree is alright, as eText-reading tech has quite a ways to go. I have an early Rocket eBook, and it's an quite wonderful thhing [if you can find one, get it ... well worth the $300 I paid for mine] ... it's great at dealing with simple text-heavy HTML docs [Advogato, Kuro5hin, /., Freshmeat, &c.] ... and it would probably do well with, say, a JavaDoc'd or Doxygen'd source tree.
It has failed me [slightly] on LaTeX2HTML'd documents ... it works and the content is there, but a more specific conversion process needs to occur to get all the navigation correct, which is really important for the limited-UI eBook.
I'd be really happy to d/l an electronic version of "Ruby for Midgets" if it was _reasonably_ priced ... and if it was well-formatted for the medium.
WRT other themes I'd like to see ... more on general best-practices in programming. I can easily pick up Ruby from reading code ... but a text on how to correctly and efficiently use -- coroutines for example -- would apply not just to Ruby but to other languages as well, including those that don't exist, yet... which helps against the one-year-in-advance problem.
But I expect it will take more than a year to write that...
I'm still working on providing material for chapter one.
Feel free to mod me down into oblivion. I'm just cranky and unproductive today.
I'm being quite general, but I think there's really a lot of OS books out there. How to run your OS, Securing your OS, Being One With Your OS, etc.
I'm looking for more cutting edge development kind of books. XML-RPC, PHP, PHP-GTK and any other web/internet high level coding language.
Give me something new, something cutting edge, something that I can read/browse through, and will help me pick up new languages quickly and make me more efficient.
Sort of the opposite of the dummies. Something that assumes you already have an idea about the subject, but dont know excatly how to go about doing it. Something the reverse of the normal teaching method. FOr instance, im trying to learn pearl right now. The thing is all the books start out at the very basic, and go to the complicated. I would like somehting that takes a complex example and breaks it down in a logical manner. Yes, i can do this on my own, but itd be nice to have it set up that way in a book.
ANd im quite happy with electonic verisons, as long as theyre vaguely palm friendly.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
As far as what I like in a programming book, my current favorite book is Jamsa's C/C++ Bible because is doesn't tell me how to program, just gives me simple descriptions, syntax and an example for just about every function in the language. That really appeals to me in that I can basically find the syntax for any function call from looking at the index, and not have to hunt around for it. I often wish that more programming books would contain syntax help, because that is mostly what I use the books for; clearing up rat's nest in my head of different langues.
I ain't evil, I'm just good looking.
I definately need the dead tree version. A small book on unix/linux admin would be nice. Just cover adding users, wrappers(firewall), ssh/sftp, bash, vim, apache, samba, and installing from source for newbies. Less than 10 chapters, less than $20.
I've done a fair bit of kerberos programming, and the available documnetation leaves a lot to be desired. What I'd like to see are:
Running Kerberos
Programming Kerberos
Initgrating Kerberos 5 and MS Active Directory
Free books, of course!
Create book in pdf format, post on web site.
We'll handle the rest.
Thanks.
Ebooks just don't cut it. Having a dead tree book is way nicer. I can read it in class when the teacher is rambling on about something pointless. I can have it in my lap or on the side when I'm working on a project, and don't have to keep tabbing between windows. I don't have to worry about software compatibility, about having a computer that works, or whatever.
Regarding content, I don't want a book for idiots. The book that taught me C++ was: "C++ for Dummies - Quick Reference". It's not a typical "For Dummies" book, it assumes who can program, but need a refresher. For people who have already been programming (in -any- language) a book on syntax is more than enough.
Furthermore, a great addition would be a set of projects with increasing difficulty and source code.
Theory is great, but it doesn't teach you real-world problems. And most people can't think up basic projects to learn certain concepts. (For example, using the Josephus problem to teach circular linked lists).
That's just my 1.5 cents worth.
Linux-related x86 assembly programming.
The only reference material I've found on this is piecemeal stuff on websites or in a small chapter in an advanced Linux programming book, or that hybrid DOS/Linux one that's out there. I think it'd be great if a book about x86 assembly programming strictly for Linux was done, aimed at beginners.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I'd love a new Samba book. There aren't any books on the market that deal with the latest implementation of Samba. None of the books describe in detail the Samba configuration tool SWAT. I'm hoping that a publisher will start work on this moving target.
Maybe I'm clueless, but I think the time is ripe for client-side Java to return, now that the plugin has matured.
How about a book on client-side enterprise Java using the plugin (applets) or Web Start?
Or a book on Struts (Jakarta)?
Or a book on well-engineered Javascript (as opposed to cute hacks)?
Or a book on delivering well-engineered web apps (objects/widgets that express themselves in html + javascript)?
John.
Addison Wesley is the only publisher that can be depended on to consistently offer quality titles (although they operate subsidiareies that publish tripe), and I would like to see their standards proliferate.
Dead-tree books are a necessity. I don't want my tech materials on a laptop, because I can't always run that. I can read a real book throughout the flight, while taking off or landing, while waiting for the flight to be taxied to the runway. It might not seem like a big deal, but if you fly enough, all that time adds up very quickly.
P.S. I would always rather dog-ear a book than make a bookmark on an Ebook, and resume reading there. Plus, I can read books when I go camping, a time when I don't bring any computers with me.
P.P.S. While we are on the subject: Geeks, think about how many trees were cut down to make all those nifty O'Reilly reference books. Take some time out of your day, and plant a tree. It helps.
I think that paper books are the way to go. Screen real-estate is always at a premium, especially when programming. And no one would want to clutter that with yet-another-window.
With that said, it's also useful to make the content available online if possible, as an abridged reference if nothing else. It's really handy for when you don't have the book handy and just want to look up "hey, how did they do that trick again?"
As for subjects I'd like to see? I prefer books that don't neccesarily focus on a single library (everything you ever needed to know about gtk!). While useful as reference manuals, the same thing is generally online. Focus instead on using some combination of libraries to come up with a useful working environment for whatever it is you're aiming for, be that quick apps, huge apps, games, or what have you.
Random and weird software I've written.
Personally I'd like to have hemp paper books. Hemp paper is of exceptional quality and a tonne of hemp will make much more paper then a tonne of dead trees.
That and I'd love to see some idiot try to smoke a book.
Things like old 6502 and Z80 opcode manuals are pretty scarce. I know lots of aspiring young engineers could use them. Just an idea, because many of the useful ones are out of print and unavailable. I realize most of the info is available online, but there's really nothing like a nice hard copy.
Personally, I would really like to see a J2EE book that isn't written like a doctoral thesis nor like a primer for manager's who don't code. The ideal J2EE book would have install guides for setting up Tomcat, Jboss and Postgresql. These are tools anyone can freely obtain and use. The books I've seen thus far have left me dizzy, not entirely sure how to apply the knowledge, and I've been programming in Java for over 7 years. Go figure?
-- Solaris Central - http://w
... are free. I can read a dead-tree book for hours, but trying to read off of a monitor is so tiring that it's usually a last resort. I agree with the other post that I like being able to put notes in the margins, highlight passages, etc. And IMHO I think there is something about having a tangible object that you can't replace.
However, eBooks are useful at times. If they include added chapters I'll download them. And I like being able to search eBooks. Sometimes it's faster than using the index or scanning through a hundred pages. So how about this: why not offer both? Bruce Eckel has many of his books available online as well (Thinking in Java, etc.). The online version usually has typo's corrected, and that's useful especially in a computer book.
Dead trees are a *big* plus. All preceding comments suffice in that area.
Topics? Let's see, forecasting for the next year, I can see a need for something centered around CIL (that's the M$ reference).
My personal wish is to see a series on doing a number of technilogical things "from scratch" like building a PC (with many of the chioces for hardware and interfaces noted throughout), installing a free OS (installing _GNU/Linux_ as opposed to RedHat, SuSE, or Mandrake -- answering the question "if I don't want a standard distribution, how do I start from scratch ... maybe even "building your own OS distribution"), building an OS (like how the BSDs and Linux are built, what things they take into consideration...).
Here's an idee -- if ArsTechnica is for the semi-expert, how about [nearly-]identical subjects for the semi-st00pid?
when they are on E paper.
Until then, it's dead trees all the way. The *tactile* experience is the key to our dead-tree attachment. When you can have the same feel from an E book because it's in our preferred form factor, and the E-ness is a benefit instead of a pain, then they'll sell.
Jon Katz, Uber-cyber-journalist-geek-critic-
writ-small-novelist wannabe.
Thank you and have a John Ashcroft-free day.
First off, I want dead trees (in book form, not lying around). Second, I'd like to get a decent book on Satellite Data Communications that is
:)
1) inexpensive,
2) not a textbook, and
3) covers the topic from a high level (basic information) to mid level installer/integrator). I don't need the math involved.
All I've found are propellerhead type textbooks (at $80+). I want the Cliff's Notes version
Chris
A year from now Microsoft .NET will have some good momentum, and I'd like a (dead tree) book on building interoperable applications with Mono. I've read all the recent controversy, but GNOME and Miguel aside I think that Mono will be as important to enterprises next year as Samba is today.
- No color pages unless they are absolutely, unquestionably necessary
- No CD-ROMs full of code when a Web site would do the job better
If I must spend oodles of money on a computer-programming book, I'd prefer it be the smallest quantity of oodles possible.
Obviously it's nice to have paper books when you're first learning, I'm sure we're all blind enough as it is from staring at the computer all day. But I can't count the number of times I've wished I could 'grep' through a book to find that one section I was reading 2 weeks ago. Can't we have both eBooks *and* dead tree books?
/. are going to want books about the latest GNU hype (Linux, Lindows - if it doesn't die, FreeBSD, Perl, anything with common occurances on /. -- maybe even a Slashdot in review, similar to what The Onion has done) but I'd consider it wise to publish books on .NET seeing as there's going to be alot of hype there. (Besides, how can we beat .NET if we don't know anything about it? ;)
Obviously the OpenSource bigots from
Just my two cents.
Why does it have to be an either-or?
The advantages of a book are:
The advantages of an e-book are:
The advantages of online material are:
Can't these all just "get along"???
Sun's J2SDK 1.4 JavaDoc is my favorite piece of documentation. It is an indexed, cross-referenced API reference covering every standard class. It has detailed method specifications and in most cases useful and relevant examples of what data is excepted by the methods and what output will be produced.
A dead-tree version would be great, provided it was full of accurate cross-indexes (pages numbers, etc). I would love something like this for C++.
The php.net documentation isn't half bad either.
Lastly, my one major gripe about books and references in general is their lack of examples, or the over-complication of examples. For instance, Sun's examples for threading all involve Swing, which accounts for 90% of the code. If you don't understand Swing, you're lost. A lot of little, simple, relevant examples and an explanation of what's happening would be great.
And this applies to more than just programming languages. I would have killed for something like this when I was learning Bind and OpenLDAP.
Make it comprehensive--full disclosure of APIs down to protected fields and methods, and examples, examples, examples. Make stuff easy to find, and make it worthwhile, and you've got my money.
I'd like a good book on deploying kerberos in a corporate network. The one book I found in my extensive search (amazon) yielded a single book that got mostly negative reviews from the 5 or so people who reviewed it on amazon.
4 4/ qid=1013025758/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_3_1/104-3227082-325 3536
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/02013792
Subtopics:
- configuring kerberos in various types of network configurations. Case study sort of analysis of how kerberos has actually been deployed in real world installations. Including the applications that use it.
- How and what applications it integrates with.
- How and/or to what extent can the MIT krb5 implementation be integrated w/ windows 2000.
- How to kerberize an application. Best practices/strategies for integration.
jason
- No power source needed.
- Less fragile.
- Less chance of data loss through accident or negligence.
- Losing one physical book denies access to that book; losing your eBook reader denies access to all eBooks.
- They smell nice.
- They look pretty lining bookshelves.
Disadvantages?Specifically, Brad Cox's now out-of-print "Object Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach".
Yep, another vote for dead trees.
:p
:)
See, men are the majority of readers of these books.. and well, we need something to do when we are sitting on the crapper
As for what kind of books?
Something that explores more advanced topics. I go to Barnes & Noble looking for stuff on PHP (I have coded in PHP for 2 years now.. I know the basics allready) and all I see is stuff like "Teach yourself PHP in 24 hours", "Beginning PHP" and other intro books. How about something that looks at the 'theory' side of the code, as to how it can be applied in <insert name> enterprise-class application, etc.
I can only stand reading about so many "How to submit data to a form with PHP!!!" or "Type in your name, hit enter and LOOK!!! your name appears on the next page.. l33t!!"
Just remember that if you write about advanced topics, you write in a way that most people can understand. Don't assume everyone has a PhD in Bullshitology
For pure escape stuff, I like dead tree books. You can read them in bed, on the john, out in the yard, etc. For tech manuals (not necessarily computers) and the like I like the electronic kind. I can search, etc. Take for example my wife's medical books. She's got a few that are Handspring modules that she can search through. Our professions are both technical (CS and medicine) so online books are useful. Having said all that, we still buy dead tree books for both our professions.
How to implement Free Software and Linux in an MS network, gradually replacing every single component from desktop, to DNS, to file sharing and printing to email, to crypto, to calendaring, to webdav, to supporting the now "legacy" apps (using a variety of emulators).
Given the current controversy with 'digital rights management' and the stability, availability, and durability of various electronic media, I much prefer hardcopy paper books to ebooks. Paper is more convenient, can be photocopied when I need a snippet from a manual, and does not depend on expensive hardware, spotty power supplies, or the largess of a publishing company that wants me to pay for each time I read the book.
As for which books I'll be looking for, that varies a lot. My current interest list includes:
Is any of this helpful?
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
Maybe it's just me, but my biggest complaint is most computer books out there are concentrating on how to use the newest coolest language instead of the underlying principles. I'd rather have pseudo-code cover how to pattern a peer-to-peer network, an mp3 codec, a nearest word match spell checker, a regular expression engine, or a typical Civ-like AI. These days I hunger for books to explain how the hell Divx works without trudging me with specifics like how to fashion an if statement in Java or an STL in C++. I want material with reasonable amounts of math and code snippets, not a rehashed programming lesson.
One of these days I'll write that encyclopedia.
-- Making computers see, hear, and think... http://www.componica.com/
I've always wanted to really learn how to run linux. I've installed it many times, but in the end it's always the same: I never know enough to make it worthwile to use Linux. I'm ready and willing to read a book to learn how, but they dont make Learning Linux Commands For Dummies, yet.
I have a feeling i'll be getting alot of slack for this post, but I don't care. There are many others like me that are capable of becoming part of the, for lack of a better phrase, Linux Elite, but we just don't have the means to learn how, and definately nothing that would compare to learning by doing.
If I'm wrong, as I often am, suggest some books for me below or flame me.
http://www.linkdj.net/
...by David Beazley published by New Riders
Is my model for a great book. Short, concise, well written, and not 600 pages.
Stand Fast,
tjg.
You could have just posted one link to
www.franz.com for all of the above
Lisp_spork; helping to keep Slashdot Microsoft
free for 3 years.
Wher if you want to learn "a" you go through that, then it suggests "if you want to learn more "a" go here, or go here to 'B'. Maybe even break it down on a chapeter or concept level. Kind of a dead tree tree. ;)
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
well, like the rest of the folks here, or at least the noisy pleading ones, I prefer the DTE (Dead Tree Edition) of my techical references. I would much rather be able to pull a book off a shelf and pull it open to a dog-eared page ("thou shalt free the malloc's") then have to ensure that I have a suitable viewer installed on a secondary machine and then dig around for the chapter I'm looking for.
However, I'm sure that there are folks here on the other side of the coin who would rather have the electronic manual for easy access. Any Road Coders want to chime in here?
I must say that having contracted for the guys who have the zoophilia fetish, not everyone likes the covers. In the words of one stressed artist who was hunched over her screen and tablet trying to setup the clipping paths for one such book cover, "I don't care how friggin cute they are, I'm sick of these damn furry things. If you don't want me to lose my mind, you'll stick to lizards and fish from here on, all these bad-hair-day animals are seriously taxing my sanity"
I would also like to provide you with another possible book title, feel free to use it as you wish.
"Windows XP: for dummies"
"If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse
I would love to see a book on practical Content Management. Maybe covering the ZOPE CMF, but also looking at the issues invloved, workflow, edititing models, etc etc.
Maybe looking at some of the more established systems (Story server, Spectra), but also looking at Jakarta, Tomcat, Velocity, Jetspeed and Turbine.
That attitude does not inspire my confidence in the content of the books.
Also useful would be requiring that someone (not the author) actually follow the instructions in a book, to insure that the instructions actually lead to the correct result. I'm just now reading a book where it's clear that this was not done, because the instructions leave out important information; which information I then had to acquire through research, in order to reach the desired result. Very annoying.
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
I don't mind e-books, but I hate that I can't add in my own notes. It would be nice if I could order a book just on a cd-rom that would allow me to copy the file to my pc so I could add in my own notes. Or, if you are worried about piracy that way, you could perhaps keep the book in a proprietary format and install an open source reader that lets me add my notes page by page in reference to the book.
Now, for my book suggestion, I would like to see more books with "exercises" that maybe all tie together in one grand project or something. The themes can be games (design a game beginning with landscapes and skins, and then define the rules and wrap it up), custom database interfaces (creating the widget buttons, linking them to commands, then enhance the interface to allow users to do more advanced stuff), dynamic web sites, defining new devices and writing custom drivers for anything, etc.
True, but this is a software problem. It would be trivial to add the functionality to an eBook reader to apply user-supplied notes to a given offset in the eBook text. Effectively, notes in the margins. Better, actually, since you can have an arbitrary amount of space, and could theoretically attach any form of data you wished.
I'm up to my ears with books detailing how to write in a specific language. Structure and syntax is easy.. you learn how to use an if statement in one language, you know how they work in all languages. API's are about the same, references documenting joe random library are a dime a dozen.
My problem whenever I involve myself with coding something is getting knowledge about all the other vital pieces to programming, various algorithms, methods of structuring a program, stuff like that.
See, for those kids who managed to push themselves through college all think this is easy stuff.. linked lists, random numbers, event based programming, hashing, and so on (have a firm grasp of these concepts, just using them as examples). That's what they paid to go to school for. But for the rest of us who're trying to cut a living and can't easily do the school thing anymore, a "teach yourself" book or books educating the more abstract parts of programming would be a major help.
Some of this is documented, slightly, on the web or in existing open sourced projects. But most of it reads like class notes at best, and I have yet to find good books that go over these sorts of things. The information is there, but it's not presented in a manner that's easy to absorb.
As an example, oreilly did a book a while back called 'Practical Programming in C'. That was a step in the right direction. It was an easy read, but taught a lot of really useful C concepts that most people take for granted. As far as it went, it was immensely valuable to me both as a reference and a tutor.
Basically, there's a niche between API references and language syntax books that seems horribly unfilled. I'd buy books immediatley if they seemed to fall in that category.
Don't publish YA API reference; Library documentation should be embedded within the software.
If I an author comes up with this great book idea,
that teaches porgrammers *what* functions/classes/messages/structures/macros
are available in a particular platform/library/tool kit/OS/compiler,
then just say NO.
Every morning I hate the scene of 30lbs or printed
MFC documentations (six books in total.) MS ODBC (15lbs.)
Win32 API (huge book, I can't even take to the toilet, about 5 lbs.)
Do I ever use those? Nope, help is an F1 keypress
away, and when I am home, I use the beautiful, self
documenting Lisp (sometimes Java and Perl, which
are also well documented.)
If you write a book, teach me "how to use" some
libarary, and give me an overview of what services it provides.
Sometimes, I buy sequel editions of old books I liked.
I have a curses book from the 80s, which didn't
have documentation for the Panels/Menus library
additions from GNU ncurses, so I went out and bought it.
Also, Don't jump on the band wagon, if I want a new
technology, I will buy books from Addison Wesley, Prentice Hall, or the vendor's publisher.
I am not gonna ask an startup publisher about C#,
I am going straight to MS press; similarly, I will
not buy a Java intro anyone, If I can lay my hands
on one from SunPress.
If you are into doing something truly innovative and not going to publish another "C++ for idiots" title you should consider publishing a book about Objective Caml. The french O'Reilly publisher did exactly this but there still isn't something like that in English. ...
Think about it! OCaml is a programming language with lots of potential. Have a look at "The Great Computer Language Shootout" (http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/) and you will see the light
I would like to see an entire book based on "Cool Things with X"
Most of what I've seen written about X is a short overview in a "Learning Linux" book or 7 volume programming manuals. There doesn't seem to be anything in between. The book should explain, in detail, the X config files, the startup files, stuff to do with the client and server. Maybe touch on window managers.
Answer questions such as "Can I just run one X server on my network instead of on every host to save disk space?" or "Can I display a window running on one host on another host?".
_.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._
ASCII art?? I thought it was a REGULAR expression
is a book I'd buy.
:)
Other books:
"POSIX the Microsoft way" (also for porters)
"101 ways to stay sane" (for the sysadmins)
"Relaxation-techniques for grad students"
And last but not least:
"Reality for dummies"
I would like to see more books related to the true meaning of technology and software implications on society development. Being the "true" understood as technology implications on human life. I know that maybe neither you or the zoo-editorial will ever publish something like these. It's just my christmas wish list for the 20xx year.
That said, if my DSL flakes out, "Fixing DSL for People of Slightly Above Average Height" had better be somewhere other than on the web. And if my DVD-ROM drive acts up, "DVD-ROM Drive Repairs for the Long-Haired" should definitely not be on a DVD-ROM. Documentation for FOO must be accessible if FOO is broken.
However, I'm perfectly happy with electronic documentation for programming languages, programs, et cetera.
As far as titles... hmm. I've still never quite managed to learn C, C++ or Java, after all these years (aside from a brief stint programming in LPC on LPMUDs), despite dealing with things like Perl and PHP and JavaScript that share lots of logical structure and syntax with C. So I'd probably be interested in "Teach Yourself C in 24 Months."
I notice that Dorling Kindersley's new line of books for the clueless includes one covering the Kama Sutra, but I might be open to a more tech-savvy approach to that topic.
.NET
XML
SOAP
The online reference manual for glib is definetely a good resource. However, I would appreciate a comparison with traditional libc, especially one based on real life experience. Also, as many people pointed out, I would like to hold the book, take it to bed, and pencil notes on the margin.
ato
I think it's safe to say that we don't want (or need) any more "How to Be An Unleashed Dummy In 21 Days" books.
Rather than Yet Another Computer Book that simply cats the "--help" into a book, I'd like to see a revolution in the computer book template. Oh, sure, a book that explains what each and every function in PHP does is helpful, but I can get that online.
How about a case study book? A series of case study books?
I'd like to see a section in every book titled, "These things will likely shaft you".
Fictionalize a manual. The Adventures of Nerd Man. (okay, this one is reachy)
Best yet, I'd like to read a book that doesn't have this damn phrase in it: "... but that is beyond the scope of this book..." Usually, that's the part that I'm stuck on.
You can probably get a thousand concepts from just reading HOWTOs and grepping for that phrase. Those are the parts where the medium-level people (most of the population) are stuck.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Maybe I missed it when I was getting started, but I know of no good book for beginners in the field of web development. One that touches on everything from what a star topology is to what python is. A broad Internet Fundamentals book. Not in depth in any topic, but an overview of many topics.
David Cole
www.davidcole.net
Large-scale project management (open-source and non). This is something that gets taught at few if any universities but is, obviously, necessary in the real world. The Mythical Man Month is useful but it hasn't been updated for a while and that applies more to the IBM manager culture than the domain of a few programmers or a distributed Bazaar.
I'd love to see a book that outlines major successes *cough*GNU/Linux & Slashdot*cough*, semi-successes *cough* ? *cough*, and failures. Including interviews, looks at their organizational structure (leutenants, an overmanager, etc.) tools, and life cycles. I'd also love to see some debate on the Multi-language/Single-Language question.
I agree with this. I would like to see more theory and strcture type books for programming and database development. The more you understand the logic behind your project the easier it is to write in any language.
First of all: God-yes we want dead trees!
There's a famous saying "you can't grep dead trees", but it's not really true. A good index will have every single word that's not one of the few thousand most common glue words in English listed with all references, in order of appropriateness. Basically, the only real need I've ever had for grepping a dead tree is when I remember a piece of humor or funny wording in a definition, example, etc., and would like to see it again.
Otherwise, if I've read an O'Reilly book (or most others) once, I can find any spot of it again, even without a table of contents.
And with a table of contents, man, oh man, does my productivity skyrocket.
Now to answer your bigger question:
What spots do you see as needing to be filled?
This is a difficult question, because as you know, there's an animal out there for anythign you want to do.
Some time ago I was learning Perl from Programming Perl by Larry Wall (et al.) and was about to implement a crude ascii text database (one entry per line) into a data.txt when I stopped myself, did two and a half minutes of googling, and soon had Programming the Perl DBI on the way to my house from amazon.com.
After a lot of fun messing around, I got MySQL interfaced with three lines (not literally) of Perl code and painlessly had a nice, robust "database" representing what I could have coded in ten minutes (not elegantly) using little more than opening a file. But look, no race conditions!
Anyway, the moral of this story is: If you want to cover an existing technology (even something as small as the DBI in Perl!), and O'Reilly has a book out, don't. Period. And if O'Reilly doestn't have a book out, you need to ask yourself: "why not?"
Because O'Reilly covers technologies. And they cover them well.
Sorry, I will not buy from you what I can get elsewhere, better. And I have reason to believe O'Reilly will be better.
I bought the Perl Blackbook, but only because it had information on CGI with respect to Perl that O'Reilly didn't. The moral: mix and cater.
If I want to code up the look of a piece of architecture without CAD, to show someone what it might look like from the inside, then the easiest, cheapest, fastest way to do this is with the Quake engine. Period. There are hundreds of people who use it to design "levels" (or however, I'm not into that) with whatever they want to show/model, etc. Sure, there aren't real physics. The software won't tell you whether that kind of building can really sustain itself. But it looks damn pretty.
In other words: find a need and fill it. If you "ask slashdot", you will get 50 intelligent responses serving 50 different needs. Each one of these responses will show you what someone would buy if you wrote a book for them about that. But what you really want to know is how many other people will buy it.
Solution? Troll the newsgroups.
I will pay you money to show me how to painlessly set up an external USB modem under Linux. Even if it's just one or two models that you can do that with.
This includes recompiling the kernel with the proper package (some extra usb standard), but I've never bothered to see how I can get a recompiled kernel to work with Red Hat, which is what I use, and which uses it's own special kernels, packages, whatever, point is it didn't boot right with the recompiled kernel. I fscked around a bit, asked a few newsgroup questions, and it didn't work out.
There are lots of repetitive newsgroup questions that begin "I read the FAQ, but...".
Take a survey (I mean, manually count). Whatever of these is most popular will be your ticket to gold.
People will PAY to be told in a clearer, better fashion what the FAQ doesn't allow them to understand easily.
Steps to gold:
Hope this helps.
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Yes to dead trees. Here's my top topics:
.NET/C#
Programming for QT3
Programming for KDE3
Programming for
Programming for Gnome/Mono
That should take you into the future.
O'Reilly books are so loved. They're concise. Although the Python Libraries book is a monster. May be their thickest ever.
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I always wanted a book that describes and compares SQL differences among the different primary vendors; and tips for writing transferrable SQL with little or no change.
I would also like to see a good book on designing and writing business-oriented OOP software. Animal, shape, and device-driver analogies can only go so far. I don't work on animals, shapes and device drivers, and the dynamic nature of biz rules does not seem to fit them.
Table-ized A.I.
I'd like to see a book showing examples how to do every type of networking possible with Linux and Java tools.
Like a Jakarta/JDBC/PostgreSQL/Jabber/Java Speech/RMI/Kitchen Sink, etc.
Showing how to get everything talking to each other would be very helpful with a little assistance on design concerns.
Oscar
With that in mind, they should be water resistant, and written with the assumption that you are not sitting at the computer. That implies less focus on step-by-step instructions, and code samples, more theory.
Give me books that teach me the trade of the industry and how to solve it's problems and I will buy them in a heartbeat.
For example, I don't want a book on "How-to-program-in-XYZ" there are to many of those out there. Instead, give me a books on "How-to-solve-XYZ". A good such book is the "Design Patterns" book by GoF.
----
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
I'm a frequent visitor of Half-Price Books, Barnes & Noble, et al., and I usually glance right past the 24-hour/teach yourself/learn-by-osmosis fluff.
Good books focus on one subject, and exhaust it. Rarely do books succeed at covering a broader range of topics, and even when they do, they are well-tied-together in the book (there are some good general Linux programming books that were great introductions for me).
I buy in-depth, comprehensive references for specific subjects, even when I don't need them! In fact, I have the entire set of X programming/user/admin books, even though I don't think I'll ever write my own widget library or window manager. I bought them because:
A) they are detailed, thorough, and excellent references
B) because they look good on the bookshelf
C) because they were $6 apiece at H-PB.
As far as on-line books/docs go, I much prefer to have the dead-tree sititng on my desk, or to read in a chair or in bed. Most of the time on-line books or ebooks are just too inconvenient.
I have found there are just two ways to go.
It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
Dead Tree books. Possibly in smaller volumes, at reasonable prices. I'm getting annoyed at having to shell out $50 for a book every week, for a huge linux bible sized book. I want smaller books in tighter topics. One of the reasons I've always liked the animal covers; they're small, to the topic, and inexpensive.
I'd also like to see more in the way of method books, rather than subject books. ie, something that teaches how to program rather than how to program in a specific language. possibly case books, that show how to get around certain problems. I'd like to see books less revolved around programs, and more to the topic of methods and strategies. It might not require a person to buy a new $50 book every week for every different program, but it will make a better book.
Meh
Embedded programming isn't that hard, if you can keep the programs and data small. The Palm Pilot is an embedded system.
Note that embedded!=real time.
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I buy a lot of computer-related books..usually something like 1 or 2 a month. For me, the e-books versus deadtree discussion books is a non issue. I can't stand ebooks. I really really prefer real books even if that means i'm going to be paying 2 times as much.
:) I think that 4 out of 5 times, they are quite exceptionnal.
As for the subject, I'm interested in a lot of things. Mostly system programming & network admins. To me, what really matters is the content of the book. I really like those books with the animal on top
Oh yeah, and I really wish there was more good-quality books out there (like hardcovers) on subjects that really matters. The C++ reference gold edition by the author of C++ (can't spell it's name) is a good example of this.
And if you are from wrox, make smaller books and pay 1 or 2 authors to do them. These new books are much less interesting than they used to be. And 20-something authors on a book makes a book that`s hard to read with no continuity.
IP Therefore I am.
How about books on merchandability, and looking for one's audience and it's needs and tastes and applying plans for succesfull comercialization in a software enviroment? I don't mean more of these "why everybody says open source will fail" that turns my stomach inside out each time I see on slashdot or similar... I mean more like "why BeOs died and windows and linux survive?" "why did adobe succeed with pdf and possible competitors didn't?" "how did the gnome people gain it's way into Solaris ahead of all other options?"
That kind of stuff.
I just posted a comment on this in the "Books I want" thread. The comment is titled "Here ya' go" and it addresses your point
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Something that bugs me mightily about the current crop of tech books is that they seem to focus more and more on a particular language or application, at the expense of more general techniques or on general problem domains.
How about "Writing Front Office Banking Applications for Morons" or "Importing and
Preprocessing Data For Relational Databases", where examples of general system architecture and design could be given, and parts of those fleshed out using various languages and technologies?
In general, I'd just like to see more emphasis on solving the problems *including* selecting the most most appropriate technology, rather than books that seem to implicitly assume that we've already bought the tools and are now looking to see what we can use them for.
Just my 0.02 euros worth.
Hitchhiker's Guide and matching towel set, ebook of course.
Ebooks suck, I do not like them, especially when I'm working on a downed server and have 4 Terminal.app's open, and I have to find a spot for Acrobat to fit.
I'd like to see:
- More books with the flexible bindings (ala Oreilly). Books that don't lay flat suck.
- More "Cookbook" style books, as long as they are truly thorough and diverse (see Perl Cookbook for a good example).
Essentially, system engineers like to see short code snippets of how to accomplish odd tasks in a quick, easy manner. Again, when stuff's broken, or data needs to be pulled pronto, I'm not going to wade through man pages, etc.
- I don't favor the Nutshell style books, they're usually poorly organized and don't comprise enough of the "right" information.
- More quality assurance. Too many books these days are rushed out to market way too quickly. I'd rather buy a book that's good quality, rather than "quickest out". Most of us customers read Amazon.com reviews to get an idea of what books to buy on a particular subject. Keep that in mind.
- Topics I'd like to see? more advanced-level BSD stuff, more kernel hacking stuff, LDAP, you can never have too many Perl books. Think about stuff your target audience would love to see. Oreilly is great for doing this, see: "CGI Programming with Perl", "Perl for System Administration", etc
A great idea.
In My Opinion (C), less tends to be more... the Gang of 4 book, for instance, or the AOCP volumes. I'm tired of breaking my arms holding a book that weighs 700 lbs. and, ultimately, makes for a better doorstop than a literary/technical masterpiece. Give me substance and power (Knuth, Don Box), not volume. Also, why has the current trend been to put fifteen authors on a single topic? Couldn't one expert provide volumes more information than fifteen not-so-expert individuals? To top it all off, please don't grace the cover of a book with their photos... It's disturbing :-)
"Joan of Arc, up top!" - Ghandi, Clone High
That's the book I'm looking for now.
Steve M
A wishlist? I'd like a decent EJB book. All of the ones I have (that being, probably all of them on the topic) reflect enormous amounts of effort, and all are equally unable to eloquently describe the concepts of EJB's.
I buy PERL books, by Larry Wall and Tom Christiansen. And C? Kernighan and Richie. C++? Stroustrup. And algorithms? The MIT white book. Why are these special? They are definitive documents on particular topics, and they are thorough, complete, insightful, and hence valuable. In all but the lattermost case, they are written by the authors, presumably foremost authorities on the topics at hand. The MIT book is also proof that difficult concepts can be formulated in an intelligent manner without a complete knowledge of the topic (as Algorithms will likely never be complete, as a topic). Unfortunately, it arose in an ivory tower, but it is precisely the type of book I find valuable.
Yet, on the topic of EJB's, the best EJB reference I have seen is the 572 odd page EJB Specification itself. And that is meant and geared towards developers of actual EJB application servers.
Heck, yah! If I could order porn on my procurement card and have my manager think it's a tech book, I'm all there!
How about a book of just general programming problems. The reader is free to use whatever tools he/she chooses to solve the problem. There is a serious lack of these kinds of books for novice programmers. In order for a novice to grow his experience, he must solve simple problems and gradually work through tougher problems. The book could also have an accompanying website where readers can post their solutions so programmers can discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, language, etc.
There is only one such book that I know of. "The Programmers Challenge" published by TAB Books (out of print). Solutions are given in BASIC, C, and Pascal but I've worked through a few of them with perl and taken a stab at solving them with Javascript.
_.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._
ASCII art?? I thought it was a REGULAR expression
I'm an uber-geek, but all this nonfiction becomes boring after awhile. How about having a book be entirely in the form of a fictional story?
.h header file would more than suffice to include all the behind-the-scenes blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah -- blah blah blah, blah blayh.
Hello world would be so:
Bob looked at his computer curiously. He knew the syntax. He knew his job. It wouldn't be easy.
Uneasily, he pressed the shift key, roamed his fingers over the numbers at the top of his keyboard, !, @, #, ah, yes....
#include, he typed with determination.
But what to include?
Was he sure.
Yes, he was sure.
This program had a purpose.
It would print hello.
And it would print it to wherever the program tended to print to.
That's right. Standard output.
#include , he finished, knowing that the
you get the point.
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Pr0n sells. Everything else is a complete waste of time. However, why not mix tech manuals with the Pr0n. Or at least replace the animals on the cover with naked ladies: a different naked lady each time. Here are some titles:
"Perl 6, and some good Pr0n because God only knows that you'll never get a date with this book."
"Embedded Systems Programming and Full Frontal Nudity, because this topic is too boring to sell on its own."
etc.
Someone you trust is one of us.
This consists, mainly, of me sitting in my apartment eating peanut butter sandwiches, reading Slashdot, and writing perl scripts that generate titles in a Madlibs type fashion: "Hacking Ruby for Midgets" (forthcoming in July).
Hey, that's pretty cool. I don't know how I'd go about doing that in Perl. Do you have a book?
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The same kind of books that /.ers (at least the ones who can pass as 18) buy monthly. Dead tree has worked well for decades, but if e offered zoom and rotation of the pix then I'm sure it would be popular.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
1. Small shop software development - building a software factory. (design methodology on a shoestring)
2. QA/Testing of software
3. Software project management
Things that people with CS degrees understand - but a lot of the open source community needs a good intro to.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nekkid+geek+g irls&spell=1
I want to see Tech books with naked geek girls explaining stuff.
This would also make a really cool website.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
I want "Step up" books. I do not want "Windows XP for idiots", but "Windows XP for NT experts" or "Windows XP for Unix geeks" would be useful. The opportunity to build on existing knowledge would be quite helpful... I don't need every sysadmin book tell me how to do IP subnetting and weigh 30 pounds. A few chapters of "what's different" with an eye toward the already-skilled would be more effective and would sell well IMO.
Trees are the best, higher resolution and easier to carry in the bathroom, er "reading room."
this sig has been rated E for Everyone.
I'd like to see more books that give a great explanation on very narrow subjects:
Programming a CD Writer app.
Audio Player programming
Ogg Vorbis programming
Using 'make'
Programming P2P apps.
etc..etc..etc.....
They call me the working man. I guess that's what I am.
I agree with the sentiment of spiral bound books and smaller sizes: I carry a backpack full of Perl books with me to my job every day (these things are worth their weight in PLATINUM). And I implicitly trust any book coming from the "Animal on the Cover" people. The biggest reason I buy these books is for their reference and example style, though I occasionally dig in for some theory. I've been starting to move more towards Linux System Programming and would love to buy a collection of books detailing the Linux APIs and other various libraries [perhaps 1 spiral bound for each library?]. Treeware is the way to go when it comes to reference materials: good anywhere you go, doesn't require electricity (unless you read in the dark frequently, like most geeks), great for note-taking and easy on the eyes (am I the only one who gets headaches reading ebooks?).
I believe C++ templates are one of the most powerful features in C++ but also one of the most misunderstood and (unjustly) maligned. I think a really well written and thought out text would go a long way to unlocking for many the power of templates.
This is a non-trivial book. A very rough contents outline might look something like this:
- Part 1: Introduction to writing templates
- About templates: a review of syntax, ending with a fairly trivial container example.
- Template style: stylistic guidelines for using templates: typedefs, template argument naming and ordering, etc.
- Template practice: when should something be a template, how to decide on template arguments, etc.
- Templates playing nice: interaction of templates with other C++ features such as virtual functions and inheritence.
- Part 2: The STL, a case study for template library design
- The STL: an introduction to the _concepts_ behind the STL: iterators, allocators, functors, design by contract using templates, etc. (maybe a chapter or so on each of these concepts.)
- Example: In depth examination of an existing STL template class.
- Example: implementing an STL compatible splay tree template class from scratch. (or, better yet, pick some other data structure that's less like something already in the STL.)
- Part 3: A Template Pattern Library
- I'm not sure exactly what these patterns are, but I'm sure they're out there. Here's a few I've seen:
- Template conversion/casting: using a template to wrap a complicated or ugly conversion or casting operation.
- Template factories: using templates to automate coding of factories to create objects.
- Maybe look at tie classes in CORBA.
I don't know who would be qualified to write such a text. Certainly someone involved with the design of the STL would be a great choice.If you write this book, I will buy it. If you offer me money, I might write this book. I'd need a co-author though.
-c
--
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
(* What about the rest of us who would actually buy -and- use such a book? [How to get laid] *)
There is a frequenter on the Howard Stern Show who has demonstrated his techniques for Howard's cameras. Gary even got a date because of the techniques once.
However, I don't remember whether it was a set of video-tapes, or a book. Nor do I remember the title. (Sorry).
Some of the tips given are:
1. Groom yourself well. Most women are more likely to get cozy with someone who looks and smells clean. Trim nails and remove the harddrive grit from under them.
2. Tell her you are gay. This will lower her defenses and make her more open. (Women get tired of being hit on, especially the pretty ones.)
Table-ized A.I.
DT books are much easier to claim on expense reports than ebooks.
I like both dead tree and e-books. I like the ebook form for books that are for refrence or are smaller in size (like perl in a nutshell).
As for the names of books, I like them to have weird names. Hacking ruby for Midgets sounds great. Those kinds of names both catch my attention and let me flaunt the books. It's much more fun to quote 'Java for Recovering Adicts' than 'Java: Second Edition.'
There are a few books that cover these, but I haven't been pleased with them. I've seen too many 3d models with great structure but horrible textures.
And lighting is a lost art. Difficult because of the subtlety needed, lighting can really add so much to a 3d scene.
Making the Leap: Jumping from Windows to Linux for the non-newbie/non-idiot Programming in Linux for VB/C# programmers Cross platform development (non-Java)
Sybex already has a book that covers Linux written for Win Admins. It's 'Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators', ISBN 0-7821-2730-4.
It's very well reviewed at Amazon.
-C
Sounds like something I've wanted for a while. I find that once I learn the syntax to a language the best way for me to learn is to study someone else's good code. Make out the problems as case studies ("You have problem X, how are you going to code for it?") and then have the solutions with important points noted as specific lines ("A common mistake is to leave this error trap out because..."). The goal would be to learn the art of good programming, not the science of writing functional code. Sort of like having an old pro looking over your shoulder.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
It is, IMHO, somewhat frustrating to find valuable information on high-level development concepts scattered through a wide variety of special interest works. For example, Programming Applications for Microsoft WIndows contains some good information on cache-line optimization. Developing Applications with COM+ has a fascinating section on generic interception. And C++, How to Program has a very good overview of virtual machine theory and development.
Of course, who wants to spend about $180US to get some info about the aforementioned concepts, especially considering the narrow scope they are presented in? Personally, I would rather lay down cash for one good book dedicated to advanced programming.
Oh, BTW... it had better be available in dead tree form.
I have a big pile of dead tree books about computing (in the broadest sense of the word) and do tend to look for more interesting ones whenever I have time (which doesn't happen a lot lately, however).
The one key characteristic of most of these books, is that they are (more or less) timeless. The kind of stuff that you can buy today and still use as a reference 5 or 10 years from now. In other words, I want books about concepts, not implementations.
I don't mind if any example code is written in a language that is slightly less hip when I'll be reading it than it used to be when it was written. Hell, I'll gladly buy an earlier edition that is 5 years old and uses what by now already are "all the wrong example systems" if I think the book has intrinsic value on the conceptual front and the new edition basically just translates the examples to something more modern.
What I'll almost never buy, is the kind of computer books that just teach you how to use today's (or rather yesterday's) version of program X or trendy API Y. Those I consider utter garbage. By the time you carried them home, they're hopelessly outdated.
I must admit to buying a few language books in the past, but even then nothing of the "Using Visual Sh.t version 3.1415" or the "Become a Java Pro in 30 Days" kind. To teach myself C++, for instance, I first read a copy of Stroustrup's second edition, which I got from a library, once. Linearly, that is. Then I started out for real by buying the ARM and the Coplien book. I bought a few more advanced books about C++ later, but basically those were not essential for me. By now, if I'd need to update my C++ knowledge to cover the STL more in depth, I'd "simply" dig up my aging copy of the draft standard.
Linux user since early January 1992.
Cheap college books..
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
into the world of computers would be a comprehensive book on how to build a state of the art computer. the ideal book would go into depth on how to look for parts that are compatable, etc...
I just thought I should mention it since apparently everybody else wants dead tree editions:
I prefer books in a searchable E-Book format, even better, if I can read them on my Palm Pilot, e.g. (Palm-)DOC or another compressed format.
This is especially true for reference books since this allows me to take it everywhere but still be able to use a search function on the text. Searching something in real books is just too difficult.
Of course, if a desktop computer is at hand, it is no mistake to have a version that can be used there, just to increase comfort.
These days, I find myself avoiding The Animal Books, because they simply aren't hard-core enough for me.
I tend to buy graduate-level textbooks focussing on difficult topics. Tired of the commodity books about commodity topics.
Plus, I hate wasting money and trees on books that include 150 pages of 'API Reference'. I have a web-browser and the tarball of javadocs, I don't need a printed version of them, or any other API, for that matter.
Maybe these exist somewhere and I've been typing in all of the wrong keywords, but I've been looking for a poster (say 3 feet by 2 feet) that lists all of the most commonly used commands in vi and bash. A single-line descriptor for each command and the syntax (if neccesary).
I've really been trying to find a vi version of this so I can have a handy reference sheet that I don't have to open up to use. It'd be great for those people just entering CS or picking up *nix.
I also like the idea of case-study books, that present the problem, show the code, and the reasoning behind the code.
Dead-tree books are a must - they provide an escape from staring at screens all day.
I'd like to read something specifically on the Parrot VM planned (initially) for Perl 6.
A while back, I read Java: Principles of Object Oriented Programming. On the spine, it said Java:POOP. It was funny, and useful. I like a little humour, and conversational writing when covering a dry subject. It doesn't have to be a comedy book, but some amusing chaptter titles, and a few amusing on topic stories, or examples -of bugs, etc. can go a long way. As for subjects...
-OpenGL programming is always a useful topic.
-Semi-advanced Java stuff. Complicated applets. applications. Dealing with java name spaces, RMI/RPC, sockets, and such hootenany.
-A useful guide to GUI development in (Win32, GTK+, JAVA, whatever) that covers both making GUIs, and making GUIs easy to use/convenient.
-A Nice accessible book on writing a REYES style renderer. basically, a 1000 page HOW-TO on writing a renderer. Include some elementary stuff, but also some advanced stuff like texture caching to keep memory footprints low, etc.
-Porn. It's all about the porn.
We do not want books full of screenshots that duplicate the online (or in rare cases supplied paper) manuals. What we want are books that explain the theory and workings of how to do things, without dating themselves by referring to lots of specifics. Put the real information in the text, and make any specifics side-bars when possible.
Look at some of the "bibles" of the industry. The Art of Computer Programming, TCP/IP Illustrated (Stephens), Advanced programming in the Unix Enviornment (Stephens again), The C++ Programming Language, Code Complete, etc....this list goes on. These books were all published ages ago but are still worth buying and reading. Much better than "Solaris 8 adminstration" or whatever. I never buy those with my own money, but if I have a specific project at work, I'll sometimes have work buy them.
In short, make it relavent for the long term. Books on the hows and whys of image processing (short supply!) are a million times better than "Mastering Photoshop 10" or whatever the version de jour is. If I think it's going to be obsolete or irrelevant in a year, I'm not going to buy it. It's that simple.
I'd like to see as many Mac OS X titles as possible. Such as:
- Kernel/IOKit Programming
- Mac OS X Driver Writer's Guide (yes, it's related to the above topic, but this could be a whole book in and of itself to get the best coverage possible)
- Unix For Mac OS X usrs
This is a fairly new/untapped market, and is getting ripe for the pickin'.
I have always enjoyed the Gems books:
1) Graphic Gems
2) Game Programming Gems
3) C++ Gems (the first one is good, the second one not so good).
4) Design Patterns by Gamma (kinda in the same style as a gems book).
Some ideas for other Gems books:
1) Perl/Python/Ruby Gems
2) User Interface Gems
3) Emacs/VIM Gems
4) Lisp Gems (I know, I know...)
How about ebook versions of dead tree releases? It would be great to have a 1000 page tome on the shelf, but a "quick reference" on your Palm. Many books have tri-fold perforated cards that you are expected to tear out of the cover and carry with you. Take that to the logical next step -- provide a small ebook version of that info. And since you're no longer limited to the trifold card, you can put as much or as little as you want in it.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
An aside:
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Jakarta Tomcat 4 (installation, optimization, and use),
Using LDAP for authentication,
IPTables (covering each of the major protocols to wrap),
Make and Makefiles (covering many adhoc methodologies used in various open system software as well as other tried and true methods)(O'Reilly's book on make is really poor. This is one area where you could easily turn out a 1000 page tome and not have completely covered the topic),
SSH (I've got O'Reilly's SSH: The definitive guide, and I often don't understand it--very myopic--would be really good if you already understood SSH),
The Darwin side of Mac OS X (overview fink, osxgnu, the various things to add, like XDarwin and OroborOSX, etc),
Thats about it for now.
Okay, if you are not from O'Reilly, then you must be working for New Riders, right?
Sorry to dis O'Reilly above, but 70% of my bookshelves are covered with O'Reilly books, and the books that are failures tend to stand out, when they are around so many successes.
When I program there's several kinds of resources I use for my information:
- API documentation. Here a deadtree version is useless to me since I prefer a searchable, online version instead. Integration with the IDE makes life even better (highlight with mouse and jump to documentation). Books with API documentation are usually pretty much obsolete by the time they get in print (recent example: core java II just got released and discusses the 1.3 api. The most current version is 1.3.1 and 1.4 is to be released in a few weeks).
- Code examples/tutorials. Cut & paste is really useful here + you basically can't have enough of this kind of information (way more than would fit in a book) -> no use for dead trees here either.
- Background information, in depth discussions of harder issues. Here dead trees can be useful but I generally prefer short articles or or even newsgroup discussions (i love google).
Jilles
I would like to see some advanced security books. There have been so many out that say almost the same thing (see Hack Attacks Revealed and Hack Proofing Your Network, etc. etc.). I would like to see some focusing on more advanced computer security topics. Like books just on setting up secure firewalls and penetration testing them. Books on the security of WAP or something like that. Books that focus on the security of different implementation of only one layer of the 7 layer OSI model. A book on database security would be very nice.
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
I'ld be very interested in a ... Leashed series.
Focus on keeping things simple, gotcha's, limiting risks, bounds on resource usage, how to regain some control, in short taming the technologies and problems.
"MS Activation Leashed"
"Hackers Leashed"
"LDAP Leashed"
"Projects Leashed"
"Spam Leashed"
You get the picture.
Please don't pay per page.
People know that for good books in limited numbers they have to pay a reasonable price,
fat books are ok only if they are stufffed with interesting things.
How about a book going the other way? I usually try to stay far, far away from Windows admin tasks, but the generally low quality of Windows admins means that I'm often left on my own since the problems I'm solving rarely fit into the point-and-click world they live in.
/etc/init.d, but what's the details?
There are books that attempt to explain simple Linux tasks to Windows users, but don't seem to be any books that discuss advanced Windows topics to Linux/Unix users. E.g., I know that the "system tray" is similar to our
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Most people probably don't even know what the plusses of wxWindows are. It might be interesting to title the book "Writing cross platform GUI apps with WxWindows". Have it be very obvious to the user that the apps look native in their environments, and that it's a very sane way of writing C++ GUI code.
Oh yeah, the URL is here
this is a software problem. It would be trivial to add the functionality to an eBook reader to apply user-supplied notes to a given offset in the eBook text.
PDF and other eBook formats already support the types of annotations you describe, but the creator of a document can specify that users are not allowed to annotate the document.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'd be awful nervous using the bathroom with an electrical appliance cradled on my lap.
I've had a hard time finding a good reference book on SQL. Maybe something like...the first half of the book covers ANSI standard SQL (plus common functions), with remaining parts of the book covering a couple specific implementations (Oracle, MySql). One or two would be good.
A modern day witchhunt.
After thinking about how I use my Perl tomes, I also think it would be a good idea to have colored/positioned markers on the pages (like a phone book) or some other method of section marking. I always put alphabetical reference markers on my page so I can quickly jump to a function description without having to use the index.
Yes, but it's so much easier to wish for something on /. than to do a bit of research.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
I want books about NOS!
To heck with those books about race lines and suspension tuning, i want raw transmission-shattering, block busting HORSEPOWER for my Cavalier Type-R.
Dude, check it out, I beat a Porsche GT2 yesterday and he was like amazed that i was so fast off the line. I did this while re-programming my fuel maps with my palmpilot. It was totally kewl!
I live my life one quarter pounder at a time -Vinh Diesel
I was in the book store a while back and happened upon "Sex for Dummies." A while later I ran across "Parenting for Dummies." It seems the "For Dummies" people are trying to expand their customer base and are fighting an uphill battle against Darwin to insure that their titles will remain as popular in the future.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
how to kick the slashdot addiction
zadok.org.uk
just the %^$#%$ next harry potter book! thats all!
I'd like to see better XML books, everyone I have ever read so far was light on the practical examples and heavy on words.
For me the best books are written almost like a school math book. Each topic builds on the last and there are lots of practical code examples. One of the best I have used on my job was SAMS: Teach Yourself Internet Programming with Visual Basic 6. Tons of practical examples, and each thing built on the last with an ever growing example of a project. There is one page in there with a code example on it that has become the basic outline of every new page I write in my job, because it ties the concepts together so well. I have yet to find its like for other languages.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
http://www.oreilly.com/ask_tim/booktopics_0102.htm l
... we generally don't operate the way many other publishers do in terms of just chasing hot topics with authors who are generically qualified to write on many topics. We look for authors who are already knowledgeable and passionate about a subject, who can look at our catalog and say, 'You need a book on such and such a subject' because they are convinced of the subject's importance and the lack of good information on the subject. If we're doing our job right, many of these subjects will already be covered with projects in the pipeline but not announced.... 'So You Want To Write a Book' has a fairly up-to-date list of the general topic areas we're interested in."
Question: What book topics are in demand?
Answer: "
P.S.: Yes I want dead tree books, and often I need a shorter book more than a longer one. (Examples: UML Distilled and the XP series.)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I really like having books that com in both dead tree and e-format. I'm surprised no one else requested this. One that I really like was the Unix CDROM bookshelf. It had the books in HTML, which is great for a number of reasons (including being able to be read from CLI), and included a little java search engine. This way you get the best of both worlds. You have an actual tome to hold in your hands, and a electronic form to read and search through.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I like both "dead trees" and e-books,
:)
;-)
but sometimes one is better than the other for the task at hand.
As an earlier poster suggested, Its nice to be able to make comments in the margins.
On the other hand, it's nice to be able to have a searchable resource available. One day I plan to scan all my Mechanical engineering books, OCR them to text, and make them available from a password protected website. This way I'll be able to find whatever I need from anywhere I can access the web.... And it's much easier than carrying my books with me at all times
Why not make it easier us "dead tree" owners to find stuff? Maybe have a searchable website where I could find stuff that is not as easily found in the index. Let people read a short snippet of search results. I'm not saying you need to risk having your entire book available for download/pirating, just page number or a sentence here and there. (?? could you generate image files with text to prevent copy & pasting ?? - just a thought)
I'm not sure how you could implement it, but maybe you could somehow release the content of your books to search engines such as google, and somehow let people know that your book has exactly the info that a person is looking for.
For example:
I am currently trying to build a Linux controlled USB-Servo controller circuit - (or even buy one).
If you had a book that included a circuit diagram for my project, I'd buy it in a heartbeat - and worry about the price later
We should get both versions. I have spent quite a fortune in buying tech books.
.pdf format rubber cemented to the inside back cover when I buy the paper version of a tech book. That would b very utilitarian.
Personally....I carry around a small library that really takes a toll on my back and is a pain in the butt to carry somtimes. I would really love to find a cd or a mini-cd with a
Nicely bound books that open flat and have a bit of margin-room for notes. The cover needn't be elaborate or thick or anything, heck a nice bit of plastic would do just as well. Headings that make sense and are at the top of each page. Even better Chapter / Subject / Topic on each page top.
Along with this I'd like a decent web site, something that contains the full text of the book with corrections & updates highlighted on a changes-page as well as in the body. Personally I don't see these as competing with the bound version of the book but if need be have some sort of coupon or registration system but put that web site up.
I'd also really like it if there were some sort of Wiki or other notes system attachable to the various parts of the online book where other readers can put their own notes and share them, pointers to other resources, updates etc. This would require some sort of administration I realize but would immensely add to the value of the book, presumably be a good sales medium for related products.
Along with this a Bayesian logic "Help Engine" would be most appreciated. Half of the time I know that whatever is in the book, I just can't find it. A "wizerd" guiding me to the right spot drawing on the index and glossary would be most appreciated.
Finally, and this seems terribly trivial to me but it is so rarely done: I'd like to be able to type in the page number of my bound book (in URL)and jump right to it in the online version, check for updates etc. I know I can drill down to it from the online index but page numbers are useful markers and can be trivially used as pointers in the online version.
Oh, and having worked with any nuber of non-native anglophones over the years a button for machine-translating a page on the website into whatever else is availiable would also help many of those folks. It may not be the best quality translation but sometimes it's enough to kick the mental gear far enough it all makes sense. Going to a 3rd-party service for the translation is a hassle, building in a translate link would be useful.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
What they hey, I'll give up my moderator access to reply to this one. I'd like to see more books that don't try to replace manpages, but put the technologies they are trying to describe into better context. Here's a short list of books I'd like to see:
* Replacing NIS with LDAP/Kerberos
* Implementing DHCP/DDNS with ISC DHCP and BIND
* Integrating Unix and Win2k with LDAP and Kerberos
Thats all I can think of for the moment, but you get the idea. I generally prefer reference books in electronic format, and more prose-oriented material in dead tree.
Woot!
Have you ever tried to read the XML Schema spec without guidance? It's not for the faint of heart.
There are a lot of well-known online personalities that have successfully made the jump to print media (I'm thinking specifically of Derek Powazek and Jeffrey Zeldman, both of whom have penned extremely readable, extremely insightful books). I'd like to see a continuation of this trend. Whoever can lure Matt Haughey into penning a slim tome on the creation and repurcussions of Metafilter or get the entire ex-crew of Pyra to pen a book on the history and repurcussions of Blogger might have a couple of bestsellers on their hands, if only because of the built-in audience each of these tools already possess.
Let me explain what I mean. I'd love to see a book on 3D game programming they way it ought to be done--by talented, dedicated, game developers at actual game development companies, not hacks who've been doing it for a while in the basement who believe they have enough skills to write a book on it.
Tradeoffs, design choices, speed enhancements, math optimizations, etc., that sort of thing. A book where the writer sits in with a game development team on a project and shows the code along with the thought process behind the code itself. Giving formulas for physics equations is great, but showing how developers in the real world use them and how they use them to animate their objects would be even better.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Yes, dead tree books are much easier to use than something electronic. Not only that, you get fair use rights with a dead tree. Not so with the electronic version due to the DMCA.
As for what books I'm looking for, try the following (in order of preference):
Zope
Python (with examples for python/gnome combination and web-based applications with Apache and PostgreSQL)
MySQL or PostgreSQL
Programming in KDE
Programming in Gnome
Kylix
Note, there are already a good many books out there on each of those subjects. Consequently, you should modify your question into something like: "What is it about the current books that you don't like that you would like to see rectified and for which you would be willing to pay money?" To which I would answer:
1. Lower price;
2. More examples (not just one kind of example, but multiple examples that illustrate the common aspects (that you need to program whatever) from the specific aspects needed only for that example); and
3. Better writing.
Unlike one of the previous posters, I don't go for jokes, etc. I want something that I can go to for straight, no-nonsense answers. How to do this, how to do that. A "cookbook" of how to do x, y, or z would be great. Granted, a cookbook would not have a recipie for everything, but if the recipies were well thought out, they would work -- as a whole -- as a learning experience and give the reader the key tools needed to figure out the solution to the problem.
Don't get me wrong, I like to hack, but usually I'm in a hurry to get something out the door quick and don't have time for the finer points or esoterica. I buy books to save time, as well as to enhance my skill set.
...are short. Say, around 250-270 pages.
Not huge 500+ page tomes that try to cover everything.
Not books with 3+ page code segments (and certainly not with code that doesn't compile).
Skinny, easily totable books. A good example is Effective C++--256 pages (plus or minus a few for endpapers and colophon).
Books that can be read quickly, with comprehensive indices to find what you want, and bibliographies to other short books with details.
Why?
Because these are the shortcomings I perceive in the major market. (O'Reilly's books being among the biggest offenders, the pocket reference books aside.) A large book is harder to have open on your desk, harder to move back and forth in your laptop bag, and (more importantly) tends to suffer from lack of editing -- authors will repeat themselves and say the same things over and over again. (They also tend to repeat themselves.) Anyone who's done book-writing knows that it's much easier and better to edit down too much content than to try to generate filler.
There is a drawback to this, though. Imagine how much more Addison Wesley would have had to have charged for The Bible had it come in six, easily digestible segments. And I do make exceptions for things that are meant to be references.
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Go fill in where these HOWTO's left off.
I know this may not interest many of the 1337 haXorZ on /. but I would be interested in a book on the UNIX subsystem in Mac OS X.
Although it is a fairly standard Mach-based BSD, I've discovered enough peculiarities that differ from my standard UNIX references to make me start searching for good reference.
Unfortunately, the Mac book market is mainly aimed at the "how to use your mouse" crowd. Even the Mac OS titles from that animal book publisher are decidedly on the lightweight side.
Since Mac OS X is on target to become the most widely used UNIX, such a volume would certainly prove valuable to both sage & fledgling geeks worldwide.
How about some good general and specific books for 3D design & animation? There are quite a few out there, but never quite what I'm looking for it seems.
Unfortunately you often need a book on the specific program you are using...so like something as specific as 'Creating Characters with 3dsMAX R4' would really be helpful. (and of course you would need Blender, Bryce, etc versions).
The only thing I've found is how freaking expensive some of these books can be! Like CDN $80 for a book!
"Programming OCR for Dummies"
It may be narrow, but I've never seen an entry level book to writing an OCR program.
I'd love a good book on Practical PHP.
I'd like to see books that take you, step by step through the process of setting up linux to perform the duties of a firewall, NAT, proxy, www/ftp server, file server and so on, for people in the SOHO environment.
I would like to see introductory books that don't just repeat the menus that are easy enough to figure out in the first place. Show me how to get useful work done. Same for languages. Either print a reference book or one that shows the particular strengths and weaknesses of the language by showing how to do difficult tasks (both things that the language makes easier, and how to work around deficiencies in the language).
What would *really* be useful is replacement "help" and "troubleshooting" for those of us stuck on Windoze. If I get another "help" message that tells me "to do a framboozle operation click the framboozle button" without telling me what a "framboozle" is or why or when I would want to do it, I'm gonna throw the computer out the window.
Dead tree books don't crash in the software sense, and are not crapped over by bugs in your code either. They do crash in the hardware sense, but are way superiour in their survivability chances. Any dealer wanting to sell me an e-book must first drop it 5 ft. on a hard surface without blinking. I sortof like having a CD with the book, but they tend to give quite a price hike. Putting sample code on a web site is much better - also for updates.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
I'd like to see books that discuss programming games using SDL or OpenGL or whatever tool is appropriate. Maybe even cover theory like Isometric math or AI. Since loki died ... we gotta pick up the slack ourselves.
Often, I like to see the problems that inspired certian fields such as math. One thing I had troubles with in traditional math classes is a set of theory with no motivation for problems.
In technical books, this often is explanations for why this feature is the way it is. It's also the part of technology that gives a lil bit of history to things.
It also helps give ideas on how to approach problems that are similar to what the original purupose were.
XML for Mental Amputees
Visual C++ by Ray Charles
Like I said, I would have killed for a good book like that.
Knuth
Some suggestions:
With my background, I'd prefer an approach that assumes previous knowledge of the biology behind the systems and focuses more on the programming/tech issues. However (if you have unlimited time and resources), you could always make a 2 editions for each book: 1 for people that are already biologists, and another for people that are already programmers.
4-star general in a one-man army.
I will resist renting or micro-paying-for "e" books for as long as I can. There are numerous reasons for doing so:
I bet that these objections are the exact things that make "e" books so attractive to big corporations. Readers (nay! "Users") pay for an "e" book by the page, every page. Fair use standards are in limbo for "e" books right now. An "e" book publisher can get rid of those squirrelly index nerds, too! While they're at it, sack all the proofreaders, because "Word" does a great job at checking spalling. And grammar plus usage checks get done.
I'd like to see books that come out as dead-tree but also have a CD in the back that has a searchable, cross platform, Copy N Pastable (For long code examples n such), non PDF, version of the book.
-eddy
I'm also toying with a proposal for Testing Perl, though it may be more of a niche market than Software Development with Perl or Extreme Perl. Maybe not.
how to invest, a novice's guide
LDAP LDAP LDAP!!!! God, there needs to be a universal book showing multiple platforms (Linux, Solaris, AIX, MacOS X), multiple servers (OpenLDAP, iPlanet, etc), and how to set them up for authentication, mail directories, mount points, hosts, etc..... I've been through multiple books and how-to's so far, and none truly explains how to authenticate multiple platforms. They concentrate on how to compile and/or install, and assume you can get the rest from there!
Hacker's Handbook of Quantum Algorithm Design
A book that covers quantum computation architecture from the programmer's view. It would be fun to design quantum algorithms. Might be a handy skill in ten years too.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
I'd like to see some introductory books to programming oriented around Mac OS X, and in particular Applescript Studio. I hear the Developer Tools are being bundled with the new machines now, which means potentially a large audience of folks getting into this in the near future.
oh, and yes to dead tree books! I've got enough windows open when I'm working on the computer without having to deal with another one for the reference.
-- "" - Harpo Marx
It reminds me of when I discovered font sizes and double-spacing when writing essays inelementary school.
On the contrary, ORA is hardly faultless in this arena. I have found more typos in ORA books than in Addison-Wesley's or MIT Press's or even good old McGraw Hill!
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
My Speech/Debate coach suggested that as a title of an Original Oratory I would write and present in High School. Mr. Lanny Naeglin...he was an excellent teacher/mentor.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
First off I think that Objective-C would be an ideal topic right now. There aren't many books on it out there and the ones that are out aren't very detailed, and usually focus on MacOS X programming while going through objective C at the same time.
Also I have found that writing plugins is a very difficult area to get into. Even winamp plugins (which are probably about the easiest to write) didn't come too easy for me, because I had to learn about DLL's (still don't know too much) from online tutorials and such. PLUGINS! It is a very untapped area in technical books. Winamp, 3D Studio, Photoshop, writing programs that use plugins, languages, various OS's, it could fill multiple books if you let it.
Also a book that goes through multiple languages would be pretty cool. Just learning the syntax to various languages is very easy (after the first two or three of course) and for someone who does a lot of programming, having a consistent way to learn multiple languages and also being able to compare them relative to each other would be a big help. Even a big table listing 20 languages and what features they include would make a good reference.
A good book on assembly language (any processors) would help too. I have old books that use old programs and even though I know the syntax and libraries of about 9 languages (some more than others of course) I don't know assembly because I haven't found something easy enough to make me want to learn it instead of something else.
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As nonya points out, I was thinking of Exceptional C++. Oops. Essential C++ is a different book, by a different author. Although both authors happen to be brilliant.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
My other vote is for reference books. It seems that there are way too many half-assed books that try to be all things to all people. These books attempt to teach the subject and somehow be the ultimate reference on the subject at the same time. These types of books just aren't any good. If you are going to publish a reference book, make it an honest-to-god reference book. Have lots of index entries with ample cross listings. Document every feature that is discussed. Spend an extra month to check the facts.
a quick google search should tell you: google
http://letters.oreilly.com/newdesign_0102.html
Also:
http://letters.oreilly.com/repkover_0901.html
I think they still print on acid-free paper (which makes the books last longer).
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I would love a book which identifies the different methods of stopping cleartext transmisson of data on a UNIX server & desktops. This would be everthing from using SSH instead of telnet, encrypted NFS transmissions, a secure communication between clients and authentication servers, etc.
GCC Internals: How it works/How to modify it. - Have you ever looked at this heaping mess of code? I would love to play around with it, but the learning curve is too high to just jump in.
Linux/Unix Lowlevel Programming: Ok there are bunchs of crappy assembly programming books out there... by chapter 12 they have covered what a register is. I don't want the most basic stuff I wanna know exactly how the linker works, I wanna know how stack frames are setup. How ELF binaries are loaded. What assembly code is needed to bind it all together. Sure I can piece most of it together from web sites, the kernel and other sites, but it is hard to put it all together.
Programming KDE 3: QT and KDE are awsome, I do a little bit of development with QT/KDE now, but there is just some documentation that cannot be found...
Architectures of Popular Linux Apps: A book that does an overview of the architectures behind popular linux applications, with a little bit of discussion about thier architecture and implementation, maybe mixed with a little theroy. For instance an chapter on apache, X11, SSH, postfix, php, konqueror, mozilla... This would be really good at helping linux developers dive into existing projects. You could even solicit open-source authors to provide an overview of thier project architecture and ask them to discuss how what thier biggest challenges where, why the did so and so.. This could really boost participation in certain projects.
Using GNU Development Tools: A book that details how to use GDB, gprof, gcov, ld, ar, and etc. effectively with all the options and do-dads. Maybe cover other tools like DDD, Electric Fence, etc.
Oh yeah! These need to be in paper form! Screw electronic form, it sucks to read.
celer
Until my company switched to Linux/Apache for our web and application server needs, I was forced to run Win2k/IIS.
While it runs just fine and dandy, quite a bit of the documentation is geared toward users running Linux/Apache/MySQL
It was a very pleasant experience to see, down below the 'approved' text, a series of users who had already solved problems of how to get PHP to talk to MS SQL over ODBC, which dll's you needed, how to edit your php.ini so that it works *just* right, etc...
Shared user annotation is a very wonderful thing for technical manuals of any kind. All online resources should at least consider doing things like PHP.Net has done.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I'd like to see more advanced Ruby books that would cover topics like:
.kde directory for?)
*Distributed Ruby - there is a Japanese book about, it would be nice to have one in English.
*Distributed Computing Using Ruby
*Ruby & XML
...notice a trend... Ruby is Perl's prettier younger sister and I think a lot more Perlites will soon be making the switch.
As far as other topics go:
* A book on Parrot (from using it to it's innards)
* A book on KDE and/or GNOME administriation
(What are all those files in the
I would buy books that educated me in using OSS applications - making Linux & the BSDs more accessible on the desktop. Examples would be:
There's definitely documentation out there on all these tasks, but in my opinion, finding and reading the docs, and then processing the information into knowledge is hard work. I'm not saying that the research isn't worth it - but if your "free time" is already pretty much consumed, yet you have a desire to create home movies on vcd from a digital camera, it would definitely be nice to quickly come up to speed on how to use dvgrab, mjpegtools, vcdimager etc without needing to become an expert.
Siggy Wiggy Figgy Tiggy a bana bo Biggy!
Dead tree books will definitly be here for a while. No batteries, very easy to hilite. I have fond memories of an old IBM Basic handbook that I took everywere.
On the books I like to see side, more security certifications books would be nice.
O'Reilly makes the kinds of books I want. I don't mean to say that I only want O'Reilly books, because there are a lot of topics they don't cover, like software engineering, general theory, etc. I also don't mean to say that a publisher is the determining factor of a good book, but generally O'Reilly has a reputation for publishing good ones. What I mean to say is that there are some factors that generally make the books with the animals good:
Generally, these factors show that O'Reilly knows their audience. A single book won't give a programmer everything one can know about the subject, but it will give a programmer most of what one needs to know and a good foundation to learn more.
I really hate to say it yet again, bnut the bottom line is that you can't get enough Linux users to pay for books to make it worth publishing them. Yes, there's the odd exception, the Linux book that sells, but they're a very tiny minority.
The really sad thing is that I've had several conversations with acq. editors that show just how clueless the computer publishers are. One told me at great length how their Linux titles bombed, and then gave me a list of a dozen books they needed authors for, including 3 Linux titles. When I asked why there were Linux books on the list, I was told, "It wasn't my decision, I just find the authors." I've seen many other examples of book publishers trying to work within their own reality distortion field, all with the expected terrible results.
For that matter, do you even want dead-tree books, or are eBooks and/or online documentation sufficient?
I can just imagine the poll...
Favorite book format:
1. Dead Tree.
2. E-Book.
3. Cowboy Neal's naked body and a pen.
I think that the Safari books at O'Reilly are an excellent model : you subscribe to a online e-book model.. read books.. and if you think that the book is something that you really want.. you can buy it ! I think that is an excellent idea !
Of course, there is always a possibility that e.g. college students (money-less creatures by definition) might Copy-Paste the whole book into a word document.. but hey, they are paying the subscription..
freeswan pleeazzz.
Gnome (programming)
KDE (see above)
Oh and leave out the first half of the book that explains 1)what the internet is 2)the history of Unix/DOS/computers. Enough of that rubbish already.
ME TOOs:
Say it with me - Ring Bound Books good - Glue bad.
If it has code - Put in a friggin CD
"Smile, listen, agree, and then do whatever the fuck you wanted to do anyway." ~Robert Downey Jr.
I love Dead tree books. I like to read programming books on a desk where it doesn't hurt my eyes. I can look things up and read -- not only reference material -- but read about things I want to read about. I look at monitors 8 hrs a day.. I certaintly don't want to look at any more monitors!
For the record, O'Reilley does one heck of a job,
and they are the player to beat. The Perl series
alone is outstanding.
I can reference anything I want using online help, newsgroups, web pages, etc.
What I want out of a book is something I can sit down and read. The "Teach Yourself xxxx" books are very good for this. Reference texts have their place, I suppose, but why should I pay for something that is already available? I want something that is interesting and will be worth sitting down to read (cover to cover). If a book at >1000 pages, chances are I don't need it.
The best programming book I have read (cover to cover)is O'Reilly's Programming Embedded Systems.
1. It was too the point - I think its about 200 pages, maybe fewer.
2. It is unique - there are not 500 other books exactly like it.
3. I didn't fall asleep after reading 2 sentences.
[FromTheMorning]
I would like to see one (maybe two) more added to this list:
Using gnu compiler(s) and how they work on both Linux and Windows.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
IT would be nice to have a book on iPlanet Application Server. There really aren't any available.
Ringbound books mentioned by someone else are a very good idea.
I have a few books that are 1200 pages. One person said "Whatever happened to concise books?" I don't care about that. I would still buy $60 1200 page book, but it would be great if it was a package deal, and split into about 5 sections. Then I could take it places instead of having to freakin' photocopy pages and take them instead.
I think that deadtree books should be sold with the ebook version included. Most technical books come with CD's anyway, what if a page gets torn, wet, or otherwise unlegible? What if a few pages are particularly helpful and I want to print them out. What if I have a PDA and want to take it with me. What if What if What if.
Selling binders specifically for bounding books and tutorials printed off of the internet could be a very cool idea too. I haven't found anything quite suited to it, but I also haven't looked very hard.
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Reference books on any technology (library, language, OS) are great. I could read through an entire reference without getting tired. Reference books with tutorials are even better.
Reading through technical information attempting to be a novel or something is painful. It's too difficult to see the seperation of topics and associate them.
Books by experts are good too. I'm much more apt to want to read through a book I know is by a knowledgable person (like Bjarne Stroustrup) than like a "In 21 days" book written by some dedicated author. Even though they are usually more difficult to understand, I will want to read through it and work to understand it more... and I know I will gain more from it.
Please help! I'm stuck inside my virtual reality headset!
I'd very much like to see...
Unix Hackers Guide to Mac OS X
Written for the experienced Unix user who is unfamiliar with the mac life. Various topics might include things like:
- How the Aqua configuration dialogs interface with basic system configuration files.
- Where configuration information is stored.
- Where to find mounted volumes in the filesystem.
- Command line alternatives to GUI-level actions (specifically configuration type things, not just file manipulation)
- use of the 'defaults' command
- enabling the root account
- "Where is gcc/cc?!"
- How network interfaces are managed (including how this interracts with the 'Locations' dialog and autoconfigure functions. What process mantains this? (i'm still looking for an answer to this one))
- Modifying bootup scripts in a 'safe' way that will survive an OS update.
There are countless other possible topics. Basically everything the experienced unix hacker needs to know in order to quickly become comfortable with Mac OS X.
-acet
as a scientist, i wish there where more books on programming for the scientist community. hello world! type crap and sorting a list in 127 ways is rather useless for us. things along the lines of parallel programming with MPI, high performance computing with C and C++, data structures for combinatorial as well as spin-glass problems (along the lines of LEDA) would be awesome. to round things up: efficient data analysis with perl, awk, and friends would be cool as well. finally a dictionary computer scientist -- physicist would be very useful sometimes...
I took a BSD class once and Dr. McKusick said, "If you want to learn algorithms buy Knuth and put it by your bed. Every night, read an algorithm. You will fall asleep. But if you don't you'll learn an algorithm!"
This never seemed like a satisfactory solution to me. Besides, I was never a Comp Sci major and I'm scared of Knuth! I would definitely buy an approachable, readable algorithms book.
I want to see a book about tips & tricks to data mine the web. Prefably with Perl. Case studies as well. Lots of case studies.
Visit Savagenumber.com
Sendmail for the Busy Administrator: Yes, the "bat book" is the definitive guide, but it's 1500 freakin' pages! Most sysadmins are doing it part-time and aren't going to read 1500 pages of ANYTHING, much less 1500 pages of some of the densest and most difficult to understand verbiage under the sun (of course, given that random line noise probably constitutes a valid Sendmail config file, it's hard to be clearer, but still...).
Regarding online documentation, I *always* prefer online documentation -- my home page is a local page that lets me click on the online docs for Java, Apache, and Ruby, for example -- but if I gotta shell out for dead trees, I'll shell out for dead trees.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I'm in the world of research and we've got a publication called "current protocols in ...." There are several of this type. they come in binders and the pages can be swapped out.
as new techniques are introduced and refined.
what about printing the next generation programming book like that. then pages can be added, corrected what have you. This way the buyer gets a book with a longer shelf life, boy does that sound funny.
Sell a binder with the base book. Then periodically release new chapters, via pdf for example. updates and corrections could be distributed off the net. and if there is a section somebody really needs, they whip out 4 or 5 bucks and get the section. somebody else might not need that section so they don't get it.
This way you could almost have a customized book.
just my nickel...
chris worth
But alas i guess the Book would be a little BIG..
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
You cant really set E-books up on a shelf to give your co-workers the impression that you're a guru.
Online docs are supremely helpful. One of the biggest reasons: they're accessible. If I'm anywhere where I can write code, etc., chances are that I can also access the internet and get to online docs. With dead trees, you need to know what you might encounter ahead of time. This is feasable sometimes, but often the toughest problems are the ones unforeseen.
Another advantage of online docs is the ability to be updated easily because of typos, version changes in software, clarification issues, etc. However, unless the error is patently wrong (i.e. a word misspelling), I'd recommend keeping version snapshots of the documentation.
Unfortunately, I find that a lot of dead trees have better content than online docs. But there are some exceptions: Java API, C++ STL docs, some HOWTOs...
Oh, isn't that an infomercial?
I do everything the voices in my head tell me to...
I'm currently working on a book that would definitely interest the general Linux USER, but probably not the general Linux PROGRAMMER.
So there's a tip for ya. There's WAY too many books for programmers out there. Probably enough so that you actually came to the conclusion that you needed to ask Slashdot for help. The real people you want to write a book for are the ones that aren't going to respond to your article. They're the ones who are sliently using Linux in the background for their own reasons but aren't bothering to program with it.
So pick an aspect of using Linux and go to work!
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
I would love to get a book that goes into Jython for Python programmers. Something that doesn't presume you already know Java; I know enough to get by but don't work with it every day.
I also like Ruby, if there was a book that took over where the pick ax book left off. Basicallly after the basic/intermediate level.
How To Do Your Job, Pass Your CS Classes, Pay Your Bills, And Keep Your Spouse Happy - All At The Same Time
perl/xml Matt Sargeant was contracted to write one for the animal people a while ago, but was too busy. Where is the replacement?
I think that the Histroy of computing is one of the coolest subjects out there. I wish that more books would be written on the history of computing, and the history of different fields of computing because it really is so facinating. The more technical the better, because it is interesting the techniques that are laughable and the techniques that we still use.
Books on genuises are cool. I did an essay once, and it was facinating. The public thinks that genuises are born with some 'gift' (thanks Good Will Hunting, thanks A Beautiful Mind). The truth is that most genuises have a very interesting history of focus, drive, and luck. I would love to spend a few hours reading about Bill Joy, what an ass kicker.
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Assembly language for Dummies
...
The Oxymoronic guides to...
Object Oriented Assembly Language
Presentable Perl Programming
Pithy Python Programming
Reusable Tcl Structures
Java in a Nutshell (oh, wait, that's been done)
I'd like to see more books like "OS/400 for UNIX Admins", "VMS for UNIX Admins", "AIX for VMS Admins". Someone suggested Linux for NT users, which is fine, but what about those of us who know big systems who need to know other big systems in a very short amount of time.
On the same vein, development: "COBOL for C++ programmers", "Flat File Database Design for Relational Database Developers", "Perl for Visual Basic Programmers". Something that presents to similar ideas (Programming) that have very different approaches (COBOL uses Verbs and Paragraphs where C++ users functions and reserved words) and presents them in a way the reader can understand.
Also, Practical Approaches to setting up a system. We just got Sun V880s, and we've had a bunch of Netras and smaller systems, we've used Veritas Volume Manager before, and we've setup big Alpha systems before, but we've never setup a big Sun. It'd be nice to pick up a book that walked through best practices of how to setup a system from beginning to end in all aspects, not just Alternate Pathing or just disk quotas or just security. A big picture book, with big pictures.
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen
Think Like a Programmer: Wrapping your mind around code and other computer conundrums
This book teaches a non-programmer with no experience what sorts of questions to think in terms of when trying to write software. It shows how to think of things in a modular, abstracted way. It also shows how to make simple data structures. I am imagine it as a companion to a nutshell book for a intro CS course or a person trying to learn on their own.
Concise Sexy C
A book that impresses tons of C idioms that make code smaller, simpler to read, self-documenting, and usually faster. From ugly to elegant. Gives good questions to ask yourself to pare down code to a more simple, elegant form.
Developing Beauty-Sense
How to gain the experiences necessary in a craft to tell what's "beautiful" in that sphere of creation. How to watch a pratictioner of the field to tell what is beautiful in your design and what is an ugly hack. That is the stage where you know that you really have a skill down to the point where you are respectable, or at least on the road to being so. This book could be on a paticular skill, or general. Either way I would kill for it.
Coding Standards: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Have you ever spent days going through "updating code documention" after a project because there was too much to change while you went along? Have you ever just plain ignored the standard becuase it didn't tell anyone anything important? Have you ever seen standards where there were often 3 times as many MANDATED boilerplate lines of comments above functions as there were lines of code in the function? Have you ever seen standards for Java and C++ written by C programmers with no understanding of OO principles? This book is for you. It goes over what adds to programmer productivity and what takes away. It shows how to write tools to make documentation of functions and classes painless. It shows how to use existing tools like "indent" to also help documentation efforts. There are special sections near the end that have full bodied examples of good, bad and ugly coding standards from the real world. In these sections there is commentary about why these standards are bad or good, and what goals they are trying to accomplish. Bomus material on explaining the implications of a coding standard to your boss.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
More? Wow, it seems like there are TONS of those. If you do some searching on Amazon, you'll find plenty.
Check out this. It's one of many.
The 1500 page reference tome is fine. I don't carry those around, they sit on my shelf and look pretty. However, I only buy those that include an e-book version so I can use it on laptop (copied to hard drive, not carry around the cdrom); it's much easier to do a search for something in the e-book than to dig through the tome.
As for "learning" books, if it has to be 1200 pages, I'd rather it was broken up into smaller books in a boxed set. That way I only have to carry around a 1lb book instead of a 8lb one.
You don't need to include pictures of everything- we're smart enough that if we're not at a computer and we can't picture it in our heads, we'll come back to it when we are near a computer.
And those "HINTS", "SECRETS", "WARNINGS"- yeah, yeah, they're important, but we're not idiots- you don't need to waste so much space with fancy borders and colors and icons so it attracts our attention.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Debian's got a lot of (nifty) quirks, few of which are well-documented. Many tasks are automated by Debian-specific tools; but good luck discovering those tools on your own. Many configuration files have been modularized or otherwise tweaked as compared to their Red Hat counterparts. It would be nice to have a system admin book that focused on the Debian Way of doing things.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
I'm talking about a book that takes you through the fundamentals of running a huge software project. Reasonable examples on how to use autoconf and automake. Descriptions of how to set up a CVS repository. How to get the most of out the gcc compiler. How to handle templates. There are plenty of books on how to program, and plenty on high level software management, but very few on using modern gnu tools to get the job done. That is what I want to see.
The middle mind speaks!
Books have to be paper.... laptops are too hard to read and flip from one section to another quickly and batterys die.
.NET" by David S. Platt, great book and not completely dry.
Books need to have some humor, example "Introducing Microsoft
Books need to have more examples. Personally I learn by example, by taking what someone else has done and riping it up, to make it do something else.
Finally topics on protocol design, distributed computing, client/server, server/server, client/client, load-balancing.
Also stay away from books that beat a topic to death and go off on a tangent to make it thicker. Example, a friend of mine, Bob Summers, wrote the "Official Microsoft NetMeeting 2.1 Book" and its 350 pages.... do I really need to read 350 pages on NetMeeting... the book goes to far into how NetMeeting actually works from a low level than on how to actually use it.
"Times may change, but standards must remain the same." - George Carlin.
Windows NT explained to Linux dudes.
Now, that would be a killer book for those poor chaps that have to do a NT-to-Linux conversion, and have to grapple with the wonky Microsoft network oddities, file security, access privileges and whatnot you find on an NT server.
It would even be better with two or three real-life examples of server migration, both successful AND unsuccessful.
SELECT first_name,phone_number FROM women WHERE easy='very' AND looks='good'
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Books are better, for now, because no one upon no one has figured out how to get a user friendly textual interface.
You must either search (and know the exactly correct search term), or you must browse an endless text list.
As for what I want to read, books on RNext or Lotus Notes for Large Infrastructure. After that, Lotus Sametime.
Not what the average Slashdotter wants, but books on these topics are scarce, poorly written, and I can only think of one worthwhile book on the topic.
I personally would be ok with eBooks as well as dead tree. I find the perl script you wrote hillarious, this excerpt from your post enbodies that hillarity "This consists, mainly, of me sitting in my apartment eating peanut butter sandwiches, readingSlashdot, and writing perl scripts that generate titles in a Madlibs type fashion: "Hacking Ruby for Midgets" (forthcoming in July)."
Get 6C 6F 73 74 at binaryoverlord
I go so often because there are so few good computer books out there. So many books are published that are oriented towards beginner programmers. Very few are really oriented towards hardcore programmers.
The thing is, I buy almost all the really good books I can find because even if they contain a bit of duplicate info, those one or two articles can be so valuable.
Some good examples are the (More)? Effective C++ and Effective STL series by Scott Myers and the O'Reilly book on Linux Device drivers (both editions).
Some topics that I would like to see covered:
I'd say the last one is probably the most realistic and I am pretty sure that it is something that a lot of Unix programmers would really like to see.
The real key is having a great deal of content. Every book doesn't have to have an overview of computer architecture...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
How about Getting Modded for Karma for Dummies?
Make money with Real Estate Investing
Please, I'm dying for a MEL reference book.
For those of you not familiar with it, MEL is Maya Embedded Language, the internal scripting language for Alias/Wavefront's Maya 3d software.
Teaching myself MEL from A/W's pathetic sample scripts, tutorials, and the error messages I kept getting was hellish.
-James
Especially a book that started with "how to fit the bits together", going on through "how to use fitted bits to solve problems". Using a cohesive example throughout the entire book is a technique I like very much (e.g. building an electronic shopkeeping system [canonical pet store?], including the web commerce side, inventory management, employee scheduling, blah blah). EJB is one field that I think from my own stabs at it really, REALLY needs a simplification tome, i.e. a book that presents an easily digestible chunk of knowledge to the beginner. Currently trying to learn EJB feels somewhat like the old joke about IBM's technical manuals (maybe it was Digital's VMS sysmanuals, I don't recall, this was way before my time): "How many technical manuals for $foo do I need to read? All of them. Which one should I read first? All of them."
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I cannot stress how much I prefer reading information in a book rather than on-line.
On to your other question: I primarily read O'Reilly books, but I have seen a gap in books about Linux clustering (intermediate/advanced) and using window managers (I've seen some on Gnome and KDE, but none on Windowmaker and some of the less mainstay ones) (novice/intermediate).
Books for Geniuses. Short, concise introductions to technical subjects. E.g., C++ for Geniuses, .NET for Geniuses, and so on.
So many books in the stores these days are huge volumes, but the actual information content in them is low. They are fluff and/or repetitive and/or designed for novices. But there are a lot of people out there with a complete education in computer science and/or many years of experience in software engineering. When these people want to learn a new area, they do not need books for novices, and they do not need concepts explained to them.
Conversely, reference manuals often present material with no context and no introduction. They use terms and refer to entities that make no sense to somebody not working in that precise field.
What experienced engineers need is thin books that introduce a subject concisely. The concepts don't need to be explained; the author just needs to show how they come together in whatever the subject is. The book is a quick tutorial and a bit of a reference book with explanations.
I suspect some books are thick to make people think they are getting their money's worth. Or maybe just publishers think that. If thin books can't be sold at a profitable price, bundle them. Put several related subjects together, or sell them as a set.
I want books that pick up where the previous version of the language/software left off. I already know what MS Word can do. I don't need to learn all about creating tables againin the next version. I know VB5, I don't need to learn all about for loops again in VB6. I want a book that will tell me all the new / replaced / different things from the previous version. If the basic concepts have radically changed, then I can see including this in the book, but bolding text hasn't changed much (if at all) in MS Word.
Along the same line in programming, since I already know all about the for loops and basic concepts, just cover those topics quickly with the syntax and really get into what the language is good for. That way I can quickly choose the best tools.
Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places.
I know these are MS examples, but that is mostly what I work with.
I really think more publishing companies should release ebook versions.
Carrying 20 books back and forth between home, work and other places isn't fun. But having an electronic version of those books that I can throw on my laptop is easier (less strain on the back). Now, I could get my employer to buy copies of all the books I need for the job but that still doesn't help me when I'm out on the porch and too lazy to run back in the house to actually find the book. Not to mention when I'm simply away from the house (at parents, at conferences or just away). On the other hand, I would much rather read a real book than read it off my monitor or laptop screen.
For example: I recently purchased the JBoss Administration and Development documentation/book for $10 (which helps the Jboss group) in PDF format. I printed the document out (double sided, two pages per sheet to save money and make the book smaller), took it to Kinko's and had them bind it. Overall, I spent about $20 (paper, toner, binding, etc) and got a very nice looking book. I'm guessing that authors don't get anywhere near a $10 royalty for each book sold via a professional publisher. And no, I am not suggesting that professional publishers are bad and eveil and should be done away with.
And as for the publishing format, I prefer HTML and if I could have my way, HTML and PDF in addition to the dead tree "format". PDF's print and look better but HTML docs are a little more accessible, universal and easier to index with htdig. In my dream world, every technical book published via dead tree's has a CDROM or URL for the electronic version.
Now, as for O'Reilly's Safari books online. I subscribed to the service for about 3 months and decided it wasn't for me. The idea is nice but I just don't think I'm ready for it. Their service requires me to be online to read the books (you aren't allowed to spider your subscribed books). When I'm somewhere without a netlink (coffee shop, plane, etc), it becomes rather impossible to use Safari. I doubt that this is something that can be fixed with Safari since the whole point of the service is "books online".
Phew, that was a long rant, just my thoughts.
I completely agree -- I would *really* like to be able to read some advanced literature on PHP. All the PHP books I've seen cover more or less the same topics and are all pretty basic.
.. three words: "mail order brides". i believe it fully supports i18n.
maybe you get DJ Bernstein to write a book about his software, good software practices in C, programming with security in mind etc
Several of the other commentors have mentioned problems with information overload (books that are complete, but weigh about as much as I do) and books that would be useful if you could get them to stay open on the desk. All of this is a problem of the lack of balance between completeness and conciseness. My solution to this is to distribute the book in both dead tree and CD/DVD form. The dead tree is like an extended index; a concise, precise overview of the real book, which is on the CD/DVD. This way, a person can easily read the dead tree and get a feel for the interesting/useful bits, and then use the computer to go to the truly important bits. If you can develop a method where you can disclose and hide different levels of information at different times AND PRINT IT OUT IN THAT FORMAT that would be really helpful. I guess the simplest way of thinking about all of this is like how the encyclopedia is laid out. There is the first half, which has a lot of short articles, and the second half which has longer articles. The dead tree would be the first 'half' and the CD/DVD would be the second half. Also, I would only want it on the CD/DVD if it was distributed in dockbook form as that is an open format (unlike PDF, which specifically bars apps that save/modify it for free) that is designed for information categorization and not just presentation (like HTML).
I prefer e-books but ONLY if they're on CD in plaintext. (Such as the O'Reilly Perl CD Bookshelf, which is in HTML) One of the biggest advantages of plaintext e-books is publishers can offer a diff against the original to fix errata, although I'm not sure how many have started doing this. Another reason for e-books is that there will come a time when paper is truly obsoleted by ultra-high resolution displays. Right now, it's easier on the eyes to look at crisp printed text. However, once LCD or OLED displays of 200dpi or higher become commonplace, the advantage of paper will become moot. Some would argue that today's LCD's combined with RGB decimation have already reached this point. I would tend to agree in some cases.
In the meantime, it is still cheaper to buy an e-book and print it yourself than to spend twice as much for the publisher's hard copy. A ream of laser paper is what? $3. Toner is dirt cheap if you buy bulk and recycle your cartridges. Just print duplex with two pages per side landscape at a reasonable font size. Buy yourself a motorized 3-hole punch and you'll have it in a binder in minutes. IMO, it's easier to read a nice flat sheet rather than a book which must be held open.
Inspired authors among you: publish on the web and ditch the dead-tree-producing middleman! Most of us, by the honor system, will actually pay you for quality plaintext e-books if the price is right.
like to see is a hybrid: dead tree plus machine readable, with an optional
subscription service for the machine readable form (to avoid huge downloads)
and reasonably frequent new editions for the dead tree version.
As part of the subscription service, I would want availability and
pricing of new paper editions.
As to content, I am partiall to really complete and well indexed technical
documentation, that provides explanations and context without descending into
dick-and-jane or bnf-for-managers. I'm interested in books on computer architecture,
documentation tools,
operating systems, programming languages and programming toola,
but avoid like the plague any book written in a "gee whiz" style;
I want facts, not advocacy.
How about a technical book of the month thingy.
Every month you would get a book in the mail. No glitz, and light on the refinement. But on a totally modern topic. A topic that is new enough that there aren't 10 book out already about it. They wouldn't be too long or short, somthing on the 100-200 page length. The topics could be a little more specific and even a little more technical then you might see in a regular consumer-computer book.
Ideas for the book are easy to come up with. Just find some new free product that has popular interest but too little documentation, hire the author to pump out some documentation at an accelerated rate. Peer-review, edit, print, mail.
Get people or companies to subscribe anually.
Sell back issues at a premium.
When you are running low on back issues, pay the autor to write a revision to be published regularly.
1)the book needs to lie down flat, with repbooks or spiral. ;)
2)I want a copy of the book on CD. That way when I have an odd p[roblem, I could jst grep the software, then turn to the page.
3)Indexing that takes into account other books in the series. Informix did thos really well with there manuals. I look up somethin in tere index and it will say the chapter, page, and book you can find it in.
4)An ability to search a web site for phrases, then have it return to me the book title and ISBN, as well as a short snipet. This way we can find a list of books we want to lookat before going to the book store, instead of hunt and pecking books that seem to be the kinds that might have the info we need.
5)Fold out of Hot chicks!or dudes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Call up Feng-hsiung Hsu and see if he got a publisher for his book on Deep Blue yet.
Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise.
How about a book that will go over dealing with Unix and 2000/NT network. Just a quick list of Chapters. NT for Unix admins, Unix for NT guys, LDAP issues, making Sexchange work happy with qmail work happy with groupwise. How about how to keep the PHB from noticing that the SMB shares are on a linux box in the corner. Making LDAP replicate to all the mail servers (Solaris, BSD,Linux,Novell 3.1 - 4) What problems will my Novell guy run into when I migrate to $OS. I have never seen where the network is homegenous, everyone has some old box needed for legacy apps.
YES!!! I do want dead-tree books!
A couple of reasons.
I get sick of constantly staring at a monitor.
It's a PITA to flip back and forth from a window that has documentation and the IDE you're working with. I lose my "rhythm" and it buggers up concentration.
Portability. (TMI Alert) It's too much of a hassle setting up a computer near a toilet.
Most non-deadtree documentation requires a GUI that you may or may not have on a box that you're tweaking.
Something to do on the train, whilst queueing, sitting alone in a cafe, etc.
On-line documentation may be handy for cutting and pasting, but that doesn't really help in a person's quest to truly grok something.
Well..... I just like books.
As far as subject matter, just find the subjects not really covered or find a better way to cover those subjects.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
really just any book will be nice AS LONG AS IT'S NOT PRINTED ON GLOSSY PAPER!
I, and many others, just will not read books printed on glossy paper, there is really just like a single degree of light from which one can read it without being bothered by reflection from the paper.
I want books with plenty of examples. Start with simple ones. Work up to complex ones that I can use in the real world.
The O'Reilly Bison book is an example of a technical book without sufficient examples. It's little more than a bound version of the original Bison documentation. The toy examples, a desk calculator, for instance, don't come close to the kinds of tricks you need to process real languages. Useful examples would be things like using flex and bison with C++, which alas isn't really documented anywhere, using bison to parse strings (i.e. in memory, not in a file), uses for semantic values, manipulating yyinput to parse more than one file, parsing non-LR languages. The last one is tricky. I once wrote a COBOL compiler using flex and bison. It's possible!
One of my co-workers just taught himself to use autoconf and automake. He told me that the examples in those books are simple and contrived. They don't touch what you really have to do to fit your package into autoconf and automake.
Given that most of your customers are male geeks, it is easy..
Replace the dumb animals with naked women.
I haven't found much of anything about porting Perl apps or coding Perl-like C++. Moving from Perl and Tk to C++ is quite a leap. Come to think of it, a newer and better Perl/Tk (I have O'Reilly) would also be great...
cheers
It's called FreeBSD Unleashed by Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann. It may not appeal to some of you penguin-fans, but it sure deals with FreeBSD from a WinNT/2K admin's point of view.
I, for one, got a whole lot *NIX-savvier through this book despite the sloppiness it shows in printing certain things twice, once in a box as a 'tip' and once as plain text. Once you get past that, it's really a great book.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I'd like to see a book on everything a geek needs to know to turn their valuable talents and ideas into a profitable and sustainable business. Keep it short and precise and lucid. Cover every aspect of running a small business, from advertising to budgets to insurance to legal guidelines. Skip the unnecessary business-speak and get right to the point. Offer insights and shortcuts on minimizing gruntwork.
I want $1 or $2, 30 page, tiny reference manuals for a bunch of languages. I want a little C and PHP function list that can fit in my shirt pocket. Unemployment = no $70 books, and those online tutorials don't help at all. I know a lot of unemployed high schoolers who need books, but can't afford to shell out $100 per language.
For the monster books, they should come in "dead tree" format with a digital version on a CD in the back. Regular books are much better for reading, but the ability to search sure comes in handy sometimes.
Scratched Emulsion
I would love a complete book on programming for Windows CE using embedded eVC++.
It shouldn't cover the basics of C++ - there are already plenty of good books for that - just the ins and outs of programming for a PocketPC using eVC++. This should include (but not limited to):
- Interface Development
- Today Plug-ins
- Pocket Outlook integration
- PocketPC Database Programming
The Red Pill
The rest of the crowd has enough ideas on subject matter. Now, how to make those books get read..
:D
:) One thing I can't stand is having to dig through droves of 'instructional material' to find out how item X works.
:p
Wide margins. People love writing notes.
A decent font size. People don't like squinting. Especially at 4am, when many reference books are.. referenced.
Programming humor. O'Reilly and Perl are good with this - FORK THE DEAD CHILDREN! FORK THE DEAD CHILDREN!
Finally, be both a reference and an instructional tool. Tell newbies how something works, but leave a thick section in the back that's simple reference. Not like, "Pointers, see p. 42.", but rather, "Pointers. This is what they are, what they do, and how to use them."
Pointers probably aren't the best example for that, but you should get the idea.
If worse comes to worse - package the books with coupons for free caffinated beverages.
Say less and with more accuracy.
There are several Linux magazines on the shelf about "pumping up your system" and "making your workstation cool." While most of us aren't the l33t scr33nsh0t d00d type, we still all occasionally come across a website or manpage or something that sparks an idea we'd never thought of that would make our desktop computer do something it didn't before.
I'd like to see a dead tree compilation of nifty ideas (complete with scripts and maybe even a CD of sources for some of it) like these for a desktop user. Along the lines of "Tips & Tricks." Personally I'd want the FreeBSD edition but there is potential for a whole series of these books. Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Windows *, even separate books for Gnome & KDE or something (I don't use them so I don't know).
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Frankly, I'd love it if all computer books came as paper with full text searchable CD-ROMS AND in eBook format for my RCA eBook. Each media type has it's advantages. I love the feel of a book, but it's awfully hard to cut and paste from paper and it messes up the screen with all the glue. It's hard to match the portablility of dead trees, although my eBook comes close. Unfortunately, there are very few computer titles for it. Those animal folks have a couple. It would be nice to have more.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Practical SNMP (not just a reference, a guide)
Software Management with RPM for the not-so-complete Idiot. (just rewrite/update 'maximum RPM' and collect royalties, rinse, repeat).
Tuning Linux for Big Iron (skip the 'what is linux?' section, btw).
PHP for soopa-hackaz
Steganography for the Three People that are interested (hey, I'd buy it).
Using Exceed
or
De-Assimilation-HOWTO (sp?)
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
What makes them successful?
I think it is this: they produce on the topics that people actually programming for a living need to understand, that are concise enough that you can read them in a day or two and jump into the fray. The last thing I need is to spend time slogging through a thousand page book. If I can read it on a coast to coast flight, even better.
I guess like everything else, you have to decide what market segment you are in. I happily will fork over fifty bucks for a well written book less than an inch thick. I never buy a book that is over 1.5 inches. However there's a whole market segment of corporate code grinders that thrive on books three inches thick with titles like "VBA in Thirty Days", with barely proofread text designed to be as reassuring as possible by presenting information as slooowly as possible. Those books serve the needs of some, but I know I don't buy them. I never have thirty days. When I need information, I need the gist in one or two days, to figure out whether this is something I need to be working with or not. If not, it's still money well spent for me. Next I need to get cracking on solving the problems I'm being paid to address, and at that point I need excellent, well indexed reference materials. The O'Reilly books often serve both purposes for me.
I don't think O'Reilly has a lock on the professional programmer market, they just understand it and keep producing titles we want to buy. The thing about this market is you have to keep shelling out and shelling out. The basic information in a two or three year old XML books is still pretty much correct, but the standards have changed and the de facto standards have changed more. This means you probably could sell some Perl books without the Camel. You just have to get out of the gate fast on the latest developments with a slim, well edited book that gets to the point. For me the best book I've ever bought was K&R.
I also think that O'Reilly considers itself as a friend to the programming profession as a whole, getting involved in issues that we care about, and also doing far-sighted things like making their commercially non-viable titles available freely.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well thought out and written books on these topics are always worth their weight in gold.
What Kind of Books do You Want?
Has someone done the "pr0n books" joke yet?
?8^)
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I'll join the chorus and say that, generally, I prefer dead-tree as well. The 1 exception to this that I have found is CD Bookshelf series Oreilly has put out. I have a couple of the bookshelfs and most of the included dead-tree versions of the books in those bookshelves. I like the ability to search multiple related texts at once, and the ability to copy the content to my web server so I can access from whatever computer I happen to be at (password protected for personal use only, of course). I can also make any changes and add my one notes to the text once it is copied to the web server. If only there were the option to compile your own CD Bookshelf...
As for topics:
* 1 more vote for Mono
* Zeus web server
* 1 more vote for Win for UNIX people
* Web application testing procedures
* SOAP, XML-RPC, Mono/.NET CLR, and other ways to get different languages to work together
* 1 more vote for cookbooks
* Web application & software usability
Create some good newbie friendly LDAP books!
There is a lot of black magic in ldap that needs to be written down. A really good topic would be setting up single sign on with unix/windows.
Mike
There's a number of large applications out there that just plain aren't covered by anything other then the vendor's manuals (which often suck). The one app that's a major thorn in my side right now is Siebel. They're really big in the sales force automation market (or "customer relationship management" depending on what the buzzword is this week). Of course, it may be difficult to write a book on this sort of topic without heavy support from the vendor.
It may not be as dead sexy as Ruby for Midgets, but it'd sell really well in enterprise IT departments.
if all books were structured the same way as Michael Kay's XSLT Programmer's Reference, 2nd Edition, I would be a happy man.
Wrox Press,
ISBN 1-861005-0607
I would love to but a book on about writing portable RPC code, and also using RPC with multiple operating systems. Also using ONC RPC in the Win32 platform, and using RPC in a windowing graphics environment. Thanks, Max
I'm in sort of the same boat. I have had some formal training in CS but not a lot (the bulk of my school time has been spent making things go boom or turn pretty colors (chemistry)). I hack perl for a living, here's two books (one perl specific, one not) that have helped me out a lot:
I agree that a book on the formal aspect of Computer Science (possibly including software engineering) for practicing programmers from other educational backgrounds would be absolutely cool. Before the CS degree holders turn their noses up too high about liberal arts major web bums, I'd like to remind them that many scientists become "Accidental Programmers" these days... We have the desire and skill to absorb the formal underpinnings of this craft, but we may not have the resources (time, money) to do so.
The book ideally would give each topic enough detail to bring the reader from unfamiliarity up to moderate skill, enough to comprehend the titles listed in the (ideally) well-populated Further Reading section... What topics? Um, dunno. Hire a couple of respected CS profs to talk it out. Look at a good uni's core CS curricula. What language? Um, dunno. I'd say pseudocode first with perhaps an implementation src repository (cd, web) in something rather universal like C. Heck, if you want to appeal to the Open Source community, give people the ability to contribute implementations ("click here to download the lisp implementations, here for the C ones, here for befunge, ..." ;-) ).
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I don't know if their 5-6 rings at the top and bottom qualify as true "ring-bound" but their binding method was great. Long-lasting too, I still pull out COMPUTE!'s Guide to Adventures every so often, have coded the BASIC program "Tower of Doom" from it several times, and it's still one of the best looking computer books on my shelf. My guess is that that binding is far too expensive for most publishers to consider.
-sk
"100 XSLT/DOM problems" This would consists of problems along the lines of, "how do you transform to get...?" Each problem would have DOM as well as XSLT/XPath solutions, with solutions ranging from ugly-and-slow-but-obvious to elegant-and-fast-but-difficult-to-understand. A companion web-site would list even better solutions found later, and additional problems for the 2nd edition "200 XSLT/DOM problems".
The problems would NOT be worked case studies that go on for pages; each problem can be stated in a quarter of a page or less.
"Hiding Cryptographic Keys" There are quite a few books on cryptography now for different operating systems, e.g. for Java and Visual Basic. None of them treat what is fundamentally a non-cryptographic problem: how to hide your keys. If you've gotten the MS or Java Cryptoapi to work and have encrypted all your clients' credit card numbers with a single key (that you have to use frequently for e.g. repeat purchases), how do you hide that key from attackers? You can't encrypt it -- you'll just end up with a new, different key to hide. Cryptographic key hiding is a non-cryptographic computer security problem that will vary from OS to OS and application to application. It starkly illustrates the principle that cryptography (for mere encryption) alone cannot protect your secrets, it can only make them much smaller (by reducing them to a 128 bit key). That secret still has to be protected, but how? As far as I know, no books on this problem exist (for programmers); but without it, cryptography is close to useless for (at least) data-storage security problems. (The problem does not apply to data-transmission attacks, at least insofar as the attacks are only on the channel, not the end-points.)
"Protocols for Everyday Computer Security Problems"
In Schneier's land-mark "Applied Cryptography," numerous cryptographic protocols are described with simple examples of where to apply them. He also makes clear that inventing your own protocol is as silly as inventing your own cryptographic algorithm. But in practice, most programmers inadvertantly end up inventing their own protocols as part of the security solutions they design. (These may or may not use cryptography, but typically do.) This book would present a number of typical scenarios -- for example, a dot com that accepts credit cards, and has a 3rd party customer service operation at geographically distant points with access to the information -- and solutions that adhere completely to established protocols. Of course, it would contain examples of good-looking solutions that are bad because they use ad-hoc protocols; breaks in them would be illustrated as well.
I would like a Linux book that explains techniques that administrators have successfully used to preinstall Linux for less technical people. Recommendations like which permissions give to which directories, stuff to hide, stuff to make available, etc... In brief, how to render Linux dummy proof and usable by my grand'ma.
...), will also be nice. This book could also show how well different distros comply with be Linux Standards Base 1.1.
Another book comparing differences between Linux distros (directory structures, configuration files,
Keep the price down, even if I expense it I'll be damned if I'll pay $70 for a book.
For whatever reason my paperback K&R has tolerated physical abuse better than my Internetworking with TCP/IP so I tend to favor paperbacks.
IMO
-michael
... and here's why:
For me, at least, dead tree books are more portable than online-documentation. "Why? This runs counter to everything I expect!" you claim? Well, get me something in paper, and I don't need a Windows box to read it when I'm away from home. Although, while I'm at home, and have a Real Computer (tm), online-doc is kewl.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
What about a book (or a whole series) that covers often unknown, but potentially useful oddities. For example, in C++:
_ is a valid variable name
__FILE__ and __LINE__ can be used in a #define macro for easy debugging
the topics are unlimited: C, C++, perl, java, COBOL (j/k), ruby, X, ImageMagick, Linux, Mac, Windows, websites, programming environments (btw, check out http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html for a great free editor), hardware.....
"a quote" -me
Okay, contrary to what seems to be the majority of opinion (perhaps Slashdot should actually run a poll on this (a useful poll, shock!)), I actually like e-books, since
Also, I think some of the other concerns can be addressed. For instance, surely it's not impossible to add some way to make notes to the e-book concept?
The best of both worlds would be to put an e-book of the paper book on the included CD.
Mersault.
Not just the topic and it's coverage, but as a whole. While online documentation is good, it is completely insufficient for me when I want to just read.
My favorite technical books of all time (despite the subject matter) are Starting Forth and Thinking Forth. They have a good mix of information and humor. This keeps the topic from being dry and boring.
Now if someone would just do this for SNMP and RMON I'd be happy.
I'd like to see a book written that isn't a "Dummies" book but also isn't a straight print-out of the man pages. Sometimes the syntax is confusing and, occasionally, contradictory. While the Books with the Animals are wonderful and well put-together they just don't help with the middle ground of those who are somewhat experienced with Linux but are far from Grand Guru SysAdmin status. Something like the "Linux Problem Solver" (unsure of exact title, actually) by No Starch Press was helpful, and limited. Oh, and a little over-priced, but hey, it isn't the worst $30 I've ever spent. I'd like to see an expansion on that sort of book, encompassing things like getting a USB scanner to work (no, the online how-to's don't go far enough, thank you) or explaining the black magic of Networking. I can't really expect a good explanation of these things, I suppose, but here's hoping!
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
One of Microsoft's better (only?) contributions to the field of computing has been their Notes From the Field books. I'm a Unix guy myself but I have leafed through one on a colleague's desk and it looked interesting. I'd really love some Unix-centric books of this sort covering subjects like working through performance problems, debugging network and DNS.
The best part is that they don't just teach the information but the methodology of troubleshooting and debugging.
We use the Fox Graphics Library in our shop quite a bit, and a good, throrough reference on that would be invaluable. As far as I know, there's no hard copy documentation available, it's all on line. And most of us would prefer to have the information in book form.
high-quality geek porn? Eeeeeew! I thought porn was filled with hot members of the opposite sex, not picts of the girl/guy next to you in the computer lab. If that is the new trend I am canceling my subscription!
First: Dead Trees ONLY! I love live trees, but online or ebooks haven't yet succeeded at anything.
Second: Topics, XML Schemas and Parsing, DTDs, etc. I think XML is going to be the next WWW technology that really changes things. A LOT!
The jokes at level 4 are Great! Thanks, Guys!
I've been working in IT for about 15 years. During this time I've spent, on average, over $1,000/yr on books (I've got 3 book cases filled).
I'd really like to see non-trivial language and environment tutorials in hard copy, the kind of books that lay flat so you can actually read them.
Here's an example of something I'm currently looking for:
Programming with KDevelop 2.0.x, KDE 2.2.x + QT 2.3.x
I'd like the book to start with, gasp, a SRD and proceed through the GUI design, Object design and finally a complete implementation.
Too many books have near useless "toy" examples that break down as soon as you try and do anything interesting with the technology.
On the other hand, having loads of reference documentation available via CDROM is invaluable. I travel 100K+ miles each year, Airlines won't let me bring my library with me:)
I usually buy books from O'Reilly, Prentice Hall, Macmillan and Addison-Wesley on "spec". Other publishers don't rate quite as high and I like to leaf through their books before paying for them.
If I can't quickly find the information in the book, then the book is useless. No matter how well written it is.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(*) Yes, I know, I know. "Goto is Considered Harmful"
I'd buy:
GCC Internals
Linux/Unix Lowlevel Programming
Using GNU Development Tools
From that list.
I agree with this 100%. I realize that the price of the book will probably rise an extra 5-10% for this feature, but the ability to lay a book flat as you're typing/eating/making love to your (very) understanding wife is a huge feature in technical books.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I was thinking Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, but I like another poster's idea of a Jakarta book even better, as I am currently using Tomcat *and* other jakarta technologies (such as the ORO regexp stuff) on my latest project. So, a Jakarta book would rock.
Sadly, all content management systems suck, and they're taking over my field (web site development) so at least OpenCMS: The Definitive Guide would legitimise an open source content management system, and divert *some* attention away from Vignette, OpenMarket, and the other sucky CMSs of the world.
I'd like some cheaper books. I really don't see any justification in the price of many computer books these days. CAN$75 to CAN$100 for a book? I don't think so.
Please.
...weaned, as it were, on the webs of ritual... (Mervyn Peake)
Seriously, for those of us who need to do windows and haven't really kept up with how the evil empire does things.
The full text is on-line in HTML format, so you can try it before you buy it. It doesn't have much on algorithms, but it's got plenty on abstraction and program structure and cool advanced topics such as how to write a language interpreter.
I love to see a book that teaches Objective-C for BEGINNERS. If I pick up one more book that assumes I'm proficiant in Java, C, C++, Perl Python, Swedish, and Greek I'm going to scream. HEY, I'M A MAC USER! I'VE BEEN A MAC USER FOR A LONG TIME! I'VE NEVER PROGRAMMED A COMPUTER BEFORE!
hah.
Oh, yea, I like printed books over PDFs any day, but if you're going to sell a PDF make it reasonable $5-10, It's not like you have to worry about all those prints sitting in a warehouse or anything.
With most technical books I buy, the thing I wish
most is that instead of having to pick up a large
chunk of DT-ROM (dead-tree, Read Only Memory)
and flip through it, that I could simply pick
up a CD-ROM with the text of the material on it.
I know I haven't really used Programming Perl that
much in favour of the manual pages, simply becuase
I happen to have a paper copy that isn't right
there when I need it. And I've been getting alot
more use out of the online copy of SICP (not yours,
I know, but it's an example) since I can skip
around and find things. My real dream, as far as
technical books would go, is to either get a
big chunk of plain ASCII, or maybe XML, something
that makes it as easy for me to get to the text
as possible. Some I've seen in PDF, but
they annoy me.
If you just need some math, stop by the nearest university bookstore and buy the calculus book, or better yet, a used one cheap at the end of the semester. A good textbook is going to do a much better job of teaching you than any sort of calculus reference book. And the market is already saturated in math textbooks.
When I was 12 my mother handed me this book (really a pamphlet) on sex called "A Doctor talks to 9 to 11 year olds". Had pictures of little sperm attacking defenseless eggs and loving parents swooning over newborn babies and such.
I loaned her my copy of "The Happy Hooker" by Xaviera Hollander. Needless to say it stopped that crap.
... but that's what you get when you ask for /. participation. :-)
Like pretty much everyone else on this thread, I love hardcopy; to me, PDFs exist simply to provide a better route to printing. However, I've grown disgusted with twenty-pound book-cubes that provide me with a hundred pages of good material that I have to search for in a thousand more pages of useless crap. The O'Reilly books are a good example of very high signal to very low noise; even the largest books (Perl ref, Sendmail, etc.) are mostly nougaty goodness with very little cookie filler.
The books that I tend to buy most of these days are the more detailed, abstract and academic works. "Learn Assembler-Based Satellite Programming In Two Hours For Inbred Slackjawed Morons" is usually good for about as long as the title suggests; then it's sold to the nearest Half-Price Books and goes onto the aftermarket. It's the books like Cockcroft's perf and tune book, the Solaris internals book (actually a gift from my Sun sales rep, but I still would have bought it), the Bach book, the Knuth volumes and so on that I happily buy from B&N and keep for years, or until the next edition comes out. If publishers concentrated on these works, I'd probably have an even larger library, and most of it wouldn't have come to me used.
Not the gloss-overs that are put in most books, but an in-depth look at how to get set up w/ graphics and sound programming on linux - something that picks a specific toolkit or toolkits and really talks about it in gory detail. Performance issues, compatibility issues, getting the most out of OpenGL/DRI on that platform, whatever.
1. Large SOC design: a guide for project managers
2. Embedded systems using ARM processors
3. Embedded systems using Linux
4. Verification of Large SOC designs
5. Synthesis of large digital designs.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
One thing which I'd _really_ like to see is a book which surveys all the great Open Source projects. It would have a chapter on each of the, say, 20 major areas (e.g. databases, GUI frameworks, encryption, games, etc.). For each project, it would give a history, the scope (size, etc), the license, how active it is, what the mailing lists/websites of interest are, etc. Ideally, it would give insights into the direction of the project, with short interviews.
Such a book could easily become a yearly series -- a Farmer's Almanac of software. Sounds like a good little earner to me...
I'd like to see a book about using OCaml, or Lisp, or Scheme, or some other functional language with a free implementation, to address real-world programming problems. (OCaml would be nice; it's widely recognized as a great language, but there's no English-language text.)
While the audience may be limited, I think there's a screaming need for such a book within that audience; almost all existing FP texts are way off in theory-land, and most predate the huge boom of the web, which is a natural environment for functional languages.
An added benefit for a publisher is that this particular technology landscape changes slowly, so the book will have a long shelf life, and is at no risk of being obsolete before it's released.
what i would really like to see is a linux book written in tengwar, mordor mode. did i mention it should be ring-bound?
I have never understood why, but I have always preferred dry, boring, theoretical books. Perhaps because It gives you a far more wide reaching, borader 'education' than "Programming Java applets in 21 days"
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I'm thinking about converting from a Sun to a Mac (since the Mac finally has a real OS), but I find it very hard to find out the various internals of the BSD under Mac OS X. A book on Mac OS X written from a Unix point of view would be great!
I don't know about the rest of you. But online documentation and eBooks are nice, but it's kind of hard to read the computer on the john heh. (Oh sure, could use a PDA, bleh, I like real paper ;)
But there is no suplement for good washroom reading material! Damn all these companies for the putting all the documentation on the cdrom's instead of in books. Remember the day of ordering a compiler from Borland and it was just known that 10 godly sized books would come with it. Try doing that now =\
So, let's say I have an X program to write and just want to get the damn program written and don't really feel like becoming an X god in the process?
I agree that dead tree is more convenient for reading, and I prefer it for any book I'm really going to use a lot. But quite a few books are now being published in printed form, while being simultaneously available for free in digital form (e.g., Bruce Eckel's books, Programming Ruby, and -- shameless plug! --- my own physics textbooks). It's really nice to be able to download the book, see if it looks like something you'd really use, and /then/ decide whether to pay for dead tree.
Find free books.
I'd love to see in-depth books on Web programming using the Jakarta Project products, especially Turbine and Velocity.
They're extremefully cool projects, but severely lacking in documentation.
Another good thing about these books is that the back cover folds in, so you can use it to hold your place, and when you're not doing that, you can fold it all the way around to the front, to protect the pages if you're carrying it around in a bag.
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!
you must not have read any books published by Addison-Wesley.
Me email iz skyewalkerluke at microsoft's free email service.
I know this is a technical publisher, so this is mildly offtopic. It says so in my subject header. Obviously, that means you don't need to waste mod points here =) (though responses would be much appreciated).
... I reformatted my system and for one month I left Mandrake 8.1 on my system ... I wanted to network all of my systems eventually, get a small server or something running... but problems set in immediately, things I could handle in Windows, but things I had no idea how to tackle with Linux. Those Linux-for-Dummies were no help; the fixes I applied only caused my system to stop booting. I tried posting to various help boards from my friends PC, but nothing came of it beyond insults and various "newbie" wisecracks.
Introductory short story: I tried switching to Linux for a month, just to see if I could handle it
Dealing with the community was too stressful. A book for people like me would be nice. A Windows-to-Linux book written for someone who knows how to do some more complicated things with their computer, but isn't interested in coding or otherwise designing new software. A book that says "so you've been using/fixing/installing/coping with Windows for years? Here's how to do all that stuff in Linux." A book written for someone on the level of an MCSE, perhaps?
Anyone got any thoughts on this (beyond the "blow-it-out-your-ass-newbie-scum!" comments =))
Also, as a quick aside, does anyone know of a Linux-for-Artists book? (yes, I know of Gimp, and no, I don't think it's a viable substitute to the software I currently use).
Let the flames begin!
~A.
student of animation and the fine arts
I think this is a good idea. I often find myself reading a computer book and start drifting off about how cool my socks look or something. I think they should throw in random facts to keep you on your toe.
"You then run it through the compiler and...
GIRAFFES HAVE LONG NECKS!
...judging from the source code..."
That's what I'm talking about.
I'd like to see a good all-around qmail book. O'Reilly was going to publish one a couple of years ago, but bagged out.
Red shoe diaries, penhouse forum digest good clean porn books
Real stories. Anecdotes from real jobs. Experiences from real projects, with real companies, with names of those involved.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
I want the examples in the dead tree books to be covered in a CDrom. I want to be able to cut and paste the code and modify it and use it for my own uses without typing it in from a book. But I can't get away from the advantages of a dead tree and I buy them all of the time.
As far as next year....a long time out... the only thing I can think of that I'll be looking at soon is Mono and C#. C# is I'm sure already covered.
And Mono is just becoming something to "cover".
Another thing. I want books I can scan through and learn enough to walk into the interview and get the contract, but has enough depth I can use it later as a reference to complete the contract. The "animal people" give me that.
you must not have read/referenced anything published by Addison-Wesley...
Me email iz skyewalkerluke at microsoft's free email service.
How about a "Book of Mathematics and Science Rules for Computer Programmers", in ring binder format with pre-made tabs to the common sections. It would be a rugged book, priced as efficiently as possible, and be used to answer questions that come up in programming as quickly as possible. From obscure rules of simplifying derrivatives and integrals when working with formulas, to how to figure out the suface area of a sphere - it's all there in a format that is easy to quickly page through and find what you want.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
Whatever book you write about, please provide some sort of official online forum where readers of the book can get together and talk about stuff, and stuff. It sucks finding something, not being able to tell if it's a typo, and not getting any response from the publisher or author. By providing an official online forum just for the book, users can brainstorm together.
[o]_O
Pile of negatives here, but all these turn me off:
- Don't try to sell a motley collection of essays from 18 different authors as if it were a carefully crafted masterpiece (unless it really is a carefully crafted *properly edited* masterpiece). Wrox books have gone downhill fast lately with this aproach. Most QUE Specials and similar mix'n'match junk repeat the same stuff ad nausem chapter after chapter. You get the feeling no-one actually read the thing front to back before it left the printers.
- Don't let the author show off how smart he is when explaining two separate concepts by combining them in some slick not-yet-explained way in the demo code. If I'm learning, I like to cement the basics with full-length one-issue code. Plenty of time later to add the slick stuff.
- Avoid 'concept' ultra-brief demo code snippets with no context. Fine for a reference work, annoying for a learning book - gimme something I can compile/run.
- Don't even think of a pay-for ebook site. Wrox (again) have lost the plot here totally. No site is worth paying for when so much free stuff is around. Code sites are great for quick reference and ideas, but suck strongly in getting the overall view and feel of a new language.
- Don't use Bible, 24, Special, Dummy, Easy, Beginner or similar marketeting crap words in the title. Developers can smell shit at 1000 paces. Tell it like it is, O'Reilly-style. You'll have to work hard to get the trust those guys have. No-one else comes close.
Edited and annotated by an honest to god Lawyer.
Even better would be a congressmen, or judge.
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
What I'd like is a series of books about computer languages that do not try to teach me programming and do not assume I am a moron. Oh yes, and are not bulky references to every single function call possible.
When I pick a new language (especially if it's just YAPL -- Yet Another Procedural Language -- of the C/C++/Perl/Java/etc. variety) I don't want to wade through pages and pages explaing basics of syntax -- I can pick it up quicky on my own. I also don't want to have if..then..else construct explained to me for the nth time, unless there is something fancy about it.
What I want is a conscise explanation of the mode of thinking that the language was designed to go with. I want to know which idioms people who write in that language use, and why *this* way of doing things is cooler/neater/a win. I want to get a feel for the language.
For example, in Perl the camel book, besides reference stuff, provides a lot of advice and examples of Ways Things Are Usually Done In Perl, along with explanations or at least hints why this is generally accepted to be The Right Thing. The camel book (and writings by Larry Wall in general) provide a wonderful feel for the flavor of Perl and why it's not just interpreted C with a loose syntax (we'll leave the fine distinction between Perl and line noise for another time).
I've been looking for a similar book about Java with utter lack of success. Either it's introduction to programming for novices, or a libraries' reference guide. The closest I've found was a book by Bruce Eckel -- Thinking in Java, I think it was called -- but even that wasn't all that good.
Lisp people understand perfectly that thinking while coding in Lisp is radically different from thinking while coding in C/C++/etc. I want these differences in thinking, in flavor, in idiom, to be shown to me for many different languages, starting from Java and Python and Eiffel, and ending with Haskell and Oberon and Intercal.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Lump me in with the rest of the dead tree people. I definitely prefer being able to take my book with me without having to lug along a power generator for my PC (since some of us can't afford a laptop on top of our PC). And I like being able to make notes in the margin that I can look at when a thought hits me, without having to startup my machine.
Also, I want short and concise material with complete examples.
Something with chapters that end with a completed iteration of a new feature, or an independent and complete example. There's plenty of Dummies crap out there, give me something that starts at intermediate, and finishes with Advanced.
A function reference in the back with the function name, required/optional parameters and what they do, short explanation of what the function does, and a short, complete, no frills example.
Also, humor is good, but I don't need the author's life story, or his ancedotal experiences with all his friends.
Last, one where the author is not paid by the page, but rather one where they are paid a little more royalties, so they are forced to write a good book that people will recommend. If the author knows his income is going to be based on people's recommendations, he's going to be damned sure he makes it not only interesting, but useful.
I want a serious of books that cover all the topics of books like Linux Programming Unleashed and Professionnal Linux Programming in a mult-volume series, but for all the major operating systems. Each of the books for the different operating systems should cover the exact same topics for the same type of thing. For instance everything in a Qt book should be in an MFC book in the same ordering. I would also like advanced books along the lines of bjarne stroustrups C++ in depth series. Right now I have trouble finding good books since most are made for newbies. Most people are not newbies! I want books with depth and topics that aren't covered in books that have the a chapter "introduction to your topic here. The last little quirk is make sure you test the code as written in the book. Getting a book that has code that was obviously not tested, or has lots of errors is horrible and unnecessary. Included E-books with either API reference or book content = MAJOR BONUS.
Anything for the Mac User who wants to learn more about using a computer through a command line, etc...
Ok, flamebate for sure, but there are more than a few Mac people who would like to take advantage of the BSD core of MacOS X and have no idea where to begin.
Apart from the obvious general information quality, computer book people in amercia (animals aside) often seems to completely ignore the importance of layout.
The Animal Company makes books that don't have a layout that is a pain to lock at and read.
If you're really from that other computer book publisher then you'd be very well of by improving the layout and typography of your books on a large scale. There so ugly I can hardly justify buying them. Even if it's an exclusive release from some Übergeeks like the three amigos or so. At least the english version. And the german versions, albeit much better in layout and readability (as your german collegues for advice on layout and typo), are sometimes completely useless because they've got the english version pagenumbers in the german editions index.
The time I saw that was the last time I bought a non-animal computer book btw.
So: Drastically improve layout, typo and design and if you publish a german version (which isn't all that of a bad idea - it's a big market) then do it right! Or leave it to the others. It's as simple as that.
And no, the animal peoples layout isn't meant to be an artpiece in itself but it isn't ugly either. That's one of the reasons those other books wander back into the shelf when people are looking for a new book on a subject and fly through those available at the bookstore. English A&Ws always lose that one.
Now that's one valueable advice by a computer-book bibliomaniac you should really think over.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Bruce Eckel discusses unit testing the examples in his books in a chapter of Thinking In Patterns. He says it improved the quality of the code in his book. Why can't book authors and publishers do the same, require a full set of tests for the source code? Even if it verifies that the code compiles without warnings and errors it would contribute greatly to the publication's quality.
Bleh!
Split the topic in say three books.
Learning Perl, Perl Cookbook and Programming Perl is the perfect example.
One book for the beginners, one for the more advanced, and one book full of examples for both.
Although the reference part of Programming Perl could have been put in another book.
I don't want to buy books, of whom i already know half of it. I don't want to read how the Internet grew from ARPAnet for the 50th time.
And i don't like books with lots of errors.
Also try to keep in mind that the communities around the topic of your books are really helpful and are glad to contribute to your efforts.
Look at how many people from the Perl cummunity reviewed Larry's Programming Perl.
Thanks for asking.
One of my favourite technical books is "C: A Reference Manual" by Harbison and Steele.
If you are/were a C programmer this is THE book -- dense, descriptive, well indexed and CORRECT. Lot of tables and figures. Packed with useful data.
This book assumed you were a professional programmer from the beginning and didn't pull any punches. The phrase "beyond the scope of this book" was irrelevant -- this was the complete guide to C and nothing was missing. Since it assumed a skilled programmer it also managed to stay at a couple of hundred pages.
I want this book for Java/C++/JSP/C#/etc. If you make books like this I will buy them.
I always thought O'Camel was a nickname for Perl... (OK, I know it's a dromedary not a camel, but anyway.)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
My book Ideas: Installing Linux and Setting Up Apache from Beginning to end. Programming C++ in a KDE/GNOME/Windows/Mac Environment Perl Pocket Guide (with real code snippets, my version would have about 200 pages w/ 150 of code examples) Customizing Linux for Beginners(About BASH and Gnome config options) 100 Common Linux Tasks and How to Do them Hacking in 10 steps
---PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE---
"Now, where's the damn 'any' key?"
No CRTs at all, of course. Moreover, until PDAs with decent displays won't be cheap enough, the only answer in my opinion is dead trees.
We have the technology for Ebooks since early 80s, but the marketing isn't ready yet.
About the titles: I will certainly buy the book about Ruby, it's a fantastic language.
You asked for suggestons. Here they are.
How about making books on Glibc, GSL and SDL with annotations and (lots of) examples?
Also, how about something on embedding Linux into small devices, thus taking care of hardware interfacing, memory constraints, small space, realtime issues and optimization?
One interesting book could be a study on all publicly available p2p filesharing protocols (OpenNap, Gnutella, OpenFT, etc.) with commented sources and tests on their throughput, benefits and lacks, with plugs into networking aspects.
Last suggestion for a book: how about choosing by popular demand every , say, six months one big project from Freshmeat and making a small book out of it?
Let's say: project analysis, theory and history; commented sources and comparisons to similar projects.
IDG books creates (or created) a Master Reference serires. I bought C++ Master Reference and it is the best pure reference C++ book I have ever seen. Alphabetical listing of keywords, concepts, functions everything! It has short specific examples and is inteligently cross referenced. They created a Java reference for version 1.1, and have a Visual Basic and an HTML reference available.
However when I contacted them I was told they had no intention of ever making a newer version of the Java Master Reference, which is one I would really like. I understand the 1 year delay problem with an evolving language, but Java 1.3 was a milestone and there should be an alphabetical reference for it.
I would also use a "Master Reference" for Perl, C#, and some common APIs (directx opengl). These last may exist in some form (by another company), I have not done an extensive search for them.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some.
(That's what happens when you let Richard "We don't need to follow anybody's standards but our own" Stallman design a compiler.) GCC is written in LISP. It only looks like C. Just keep LISP in mind and it all makes sense.
Anyhow, you owe Joseph Myers some thanks. He's one of the C front-end maintainers, but he's also been ruthlessly documenting the entire compiler, and demanding that anybody who checks in a user-visible change update the documentation as well. (Others have certainly helped, but Joseph has been the driving force.)
So, there's now a GCC Internals manual as part of the documentation.
I saw this in a bookstore the other day, but I don't recall the title. It was Linux-specific, however. For ELF stuff, there's a decent specification as part of the ELF File Format. For ld/ar/as/etc programming, you're screwed. They're all part of the "binutils" package, and those developers for the most part don't believe in keeping documentation up to date.
New Riders has been publishing a lot of these books. The "Goat Book" for example is about autoconf, automake, and libtool.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
MCSE's are the lowest form of windows life, right after grandma.
Now to information. I had a similar experience doing my first install of linux (SuSe as it were). My install was difficult, as it was a 'from hard drive' install. I eventually got everything but X working.
The best reference I found was on my *other* machine, going to Alta Vista (it was 4 years ago, did not know of google) and searching newbie sites. Admittadly most linux newbie sites are a little *too* sophisticated to handle specific introductory problems. Like telling the user that 'man' will provide help... or hda is the common ide hard drive reference...
It only took a month or so hunting through how-to's for nuggets of useful information, but I eventually got the little SuSe box doing auto-dial natting.
I have actually considered making either a site or book based on the inter-operability notion given that I admin win2k and *nix machines daily. It would not be *too* sophisticated as I've not done *too* much with *nix machines (simple kernel rebuilds in BSD is about my "leet"ness)
The site would have the benefit of allowing users to go from unix to windows and vice versa.
I want a book that gives a series of problems, including basic design information. It would be used to get you familiar with a language. "Hello World" is the quintessential first program, but what's the second? As you go through the book, the problems should get more involved, and require a greater knowledge of the language to accomplish. I, for one, learn alot more about a language when I'm actually trying to use it.
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
Is books that do not use large amount of white space and large fonts to make it look like they have a lot in but don't.
No more books on C for dummys, Java for idiots, learn C++ in 24 hrs. Been there, done that.
I do want Books on difficult things such as using perl with C, strange languages no one but me has heard off, Lots of good examples I can go away and play with.
Perfer dead trees because I can put them on my book case and say to myself, I'll never read all that. But I'll put up with e-books if that is the only way.
Like O'Reilly, Wrox and New Riders. If your one of them, well done. The bad ones and rip offs are to many to mention.
P.S a new book on erlang would be nice(See above comment on unknown languages)
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
A *solid* book on CVS is badly needed. Yes I've seen Open Source Dev. w/ CVS, and the CVS Pocket Reference. (And I'm not even going to mention the Cederqvist -- that thing is just *awful* (IMHO).)
I want something that gives me a nonsense, cut-to-the chase, explanation on CVS. Especially one that will do when you don't have a CVS expert around. When first trying to learn CVS, I would have paid good money for a book with just this sentence alone: 'never mind checkout past setup -- and update alone is just stupid. 'update -Pd' is really what you want'.
I love CVS but it would hard to deny it's one of the more archaic programs still out there. Some may love that, but when I have serious work to do, fucking around with CVS is not high on my priority list.
-Bill
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
Just recently I had to go from 0 knowledge of RDBMS to a working web app. The elephant postgresql book by Bruce Momjian (ISBN: 0201703319) was just about perfect. It explained from reasonably basic concepts using lots of examples, but wasn't really hugely wordy. It went from the basics through some fairly advanced usage, but left out the really arcane stuff (but did reference where you could find that if you wanted it).
More important than anything else, IMHO, was that it has a really, really good index.
Speaking at least for myself, that book should be used as a model for other books of its class.
Keep them under 300 pages. If that's impossible, start by keeping them under 400 pages.
In December, I posted a brief article called The Thin Book Movement on my weblog, Skipping Dot Net, and somehow it got enough attention (without even being Slashdotted) that if you search Google for "thin books", I'm the number one result.
And if you search for "thin book", singular, only thinbook.com comes above my little article.
It blows my mind that for a few weeks, at least, I've owned the thin book meme on Google. That tells me that the subject isn't getting nearly the attention it deserves, so thanks for opening up this forum for it's discussion.
In my linkfests and book reviews, I offer these completely arbitrary guidelines in answer to the question, Is it a thin book?
- Less than 300 pages: Yes
- 300 to 399 pages: No, but close
- 400 to 499 pages: No
- 500 to 599 pages: Far from it
- 600 or more pages: Hell, no!
If you're hesitant to think of a 300 page book as thin, you're not alone. But we're talking about the computer book publishing industry here, we have to start somewhere.So thanks to the others who've replied "Thin!" for keeping the meme alive. O'Reilly usually gets it, as does No Starch Press, and New Riders gets it about half the time.
Please, Mr. or Ms. ctrimble, join the Thin Book Movement. If your firm needs convincing, check my article for the reasoning that makes it easier for us readers to buy thin books than thick ones.
- Shane
I would very much like to see a good reference manual for UnrealEd2 (and the new editor that will ship with U2 and UT2) - like 600 pages plus. Ideally it would cover all the elements of level design/construction, how to use all the basic thru advanced features of the editor, and a primer on creating mods. Include a cd filled with examples to illustrate the text and a libarary of freeware utility programs.
Thousands of information sources on these topics is available on the internet. It's about time someone wrote a manual to bring it all together - because Epic isn't *ever* going to do this.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/06/183425 3&mode=thread
I've always found that one of the strengths of e-texts is the ability to search them. Why not combine this into a service?
It would interface similar to Google. You would enter a search like "How do you secure a Linux box?". Up would come a list of search results, from a database of the content of a few ebooks. The results would link to at most a paragraph from that book (and perhaps the first page of the chapter, like Amazon). This would allow users to know if they wanted to buy that chapter/book, without revealing the whole answer. A click to add it to your cart (or join a subscription for unlimited ebooks). Then viola! I have my answer, and you have my money.
Download your mp3s any way you want, and support the artist via FairTunes
The US should grow hemp to make paper instead of killing trees. I can't be the only one that sees this as a no-brainer.
I got SAMS "teach yourself python in 24 hours" and while the text is good, the screendumps are horrible. The code snippets are fine, but I need a magnefying glass to read the the screendumbs
I can do make (and there are books if I can't), I can do C++ (and there are plenty of books on that), and I could figure out how to debug in MS VC++.
But just last week I was _desperately_ looking for a book about debugging with gdb. Feel free to includ any other tools that might help with debugging, optimizing, whatever. I realize that all of this is out there in docs or on the Net, but I want something thorough, easy-to-read, with lots of examples.
As soon as you publish this book, I will buy it!
I've sort of been working on a book of my own...
Basically, its about all the stuff you need to know to be a professional programmer, but that is rarely covered, or glossed over in school and books. Im writing a book about Makefiles, and Source Code Control, and about all the C++ gotcha's (things like, initializer lists happen in the order member variables are declared, NOT in their visual order)... I plan on covering all of the really standard algorithms and data structures... Hash Tables, Linked Lists, Binary Searching and Quick Sorts... Basically I want a book that could jumpstart a fresh CS graduate's career... What does everyone think of this idea?
hard core geek-ware
I know there is a ton of documentation online, but I would LOVE a book that took you from simple scripts, to the most complex and elaborate scripts you can think of. Examples and baby steps would be something I would love to get. A reference to IPChains and IPTables would be a book I would buy guarenteed.
I have no signature
The c++ wrappers for gtk.
Cheers,
dar
How to tell when you're choosing the wrong tool to solve a problem.
When to tell a project is doomed from the start and how to save it.
Sterling Huges' "PHP developer's cookbook" is simply exellent. It is from SAMS. It is really well written and throuhout. I would like a similar book on python. (I'd also like pythons online documentation to bee as good as PHPs, but I think that's a bit offtopic ;) )
This is a great book just waiting to happen! The APIs and Object Model are well documented, but not documented well. They are cryptic as hell to read and you have to jump through about 12 pages to find any concrete info. Please write this book!
I am working now as a teacher for both ROP and Adult education. What I really could use are classic samples for programming that has a set of logical problems to introduce programming concepts and build. I normally start with the standard "Hello World" to Calculators, address books, Network message clients and say a Tic-Tac-Toe game with AI. However, I could use more idea's for a school setting.
If you included code, Python or VB would be really welcome but I am not so much interested in the heavy details as I am in staged concepts, perferably ones that aren't boring as h***.
Berkeley invented LSD and Unix, and I don't think that's a coincidence.
-Debugging Linus work!
-How to search the internet
-Microsoft bug list in less then 10 volumes
-How to indent code
-A practical guide of the sleeping process
I'm not sure if this could be profitably wrapped into dead-tree form, but maybe this will help you in your quest.
A Nerd's guide to sex
Casanova's Tips
Sex Tips for Geeks
Oh, and you should probably also get some new clothes.
Download your mp3s any way you want, and support the artist via FairTunes
Take them to Kinko's and have them whack off the binding. Then ask them to comb bind it. Shouldn't cost you more than $3-4.
I used to work at a Kinko's and did this with several programming books for that very reason.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
The best would be:
"The Linux Kernel Hacker's Guide to Talking to Girls"
"Slashdot for Dummies" is all we need...
I would really like to see a book on Design Patterns that is easier to read than the definitive Gang of Four book. This is an idea that is just waiting to be clearly and plainly communicated to the masses.
"How to download programs ported from unix"
When you need a PC program there is usually one link, perhaps two -when you want to download something which has been ported from unix/linux there are 20 links all pointing to 200 directories with different content. Arrgh!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I think the real potential value of E-Books is being overlooked. The story posting mentioned a 1 year product cycle to take a book from Marketing Idea to Stack of Dead Tree copies. Much can and does happen in any computing subject in that time and the resulting dead tree books suffer due to this.
E-Books on the other hand suffer from publishing company fear of piracy and have been encumbered with onerous copy protection schemesthat just get in the way of the user.
So my proposal is to eliminate both problems through a better E-Book business model. Instead of building the E-Book in an obscure/encrypted format to defend it from piracy, move to the "Annual Microsoft Tax" business model and distribute the basic book rather cheaply and in some open standard format. Then put up a pay-per-update CVS server to sell regular upgrades to your paying customers. In rapidly evolving development languages/environments this really pay off. Have the updater highlight the changes so that you can find them easily as you browse the text so that you know what the changes from Java 1.3 to 1.4 or PHP 4.0x to 4.1x (or whatever) are without going through side by side API comparisons.
I'd like to see books such as transitioning to Objective-C from C++ and another on transitioning from Java. Also, there are no advanced books on Cocoa and that is a hole that needs to be filled - Cocoa is a growing market. Specifically I'd liked to see an advanced level Cocoa GUI app programming book with topics such as on the fly adding, removing, laying out and controlling(selection across multiple) of views and controllers inside a NSView; tips for better drawing performance; advice for how to best access large files depending on usage of the data; etcetera.
This may just be my ignorance, but I've never found a book about palm programming that doesn't focus on codewarrior to the (seeming) exclusion of all else, even if other tools are included.
Since my project is a little one, I've been hoping to find something that will help me use the (free) pilrc toolchain. Hopefully something containing a lot of examples.
Yeah, I have a webcomic...
I want a comphresive WxWindows book styled like Harbison and Steele's 'C: A Reference Manual'. It might be hard to picture but stick with it a moment.
I want an Introduction to Computers book that works from each of the widgets and keystroke combinations to teach newbies how to use their computers effectively by focusing on teaching from the building blocks of applications on up.
I want a book covering libtiff though I am uncertain how I would want it layed out or if anyone else would care.
I want a book modeled after OpenBSD styled code reviews for security, technique, and coding practices.
I want someone to reprint all three of Marc Behm's stories in one volume. Ok, so that one wasn't a computer book. Sue me.
Now if you pay me an advance, I'd even start writing some of them...
~~ What's stopping you?
As a programmer who spends an inordinate amount of time commuting too and from work (over 2 hours a day) what would really make my life better would be Technical Audio Books. I've thought about this a bit and it seems clear to me that the real low-level, "How do I write a . . ." cannot be conveyed in audio fashion. What would work, though, would be the theory and architecture behind, say, JCA adapters. Once I know the theory behind a particular technology, the actual programming is much easier. I would easily pay $60 to $80 for four hours of good material, especially because I could play it over and over again until I really got it (or got sick of it).
Well, this will probably get me flamed to oblivion but I will post it anyway.
I would like to see some good books dealing with C++ in VS.net. There are all kinds of books on VB.net and C#, but almost nothing on managed C++, changes to MFC and ATL, the new winforms and webforms, etc. There are quite a few of us making a living making client side apps in C++ for windows, it would be nice to learn what the future has in store for us.
- WeaselGod
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet turbines
If you implemented online books how would you charge for them? I personally could not live without going to B&N and browsing through a book before I make a decision. You could make sample pages available online but then you could just pick out the really good pages and make them viewable while the rest of the book contains nothing but *fluff*.
Linux (as a system, not (just) a kernel) is mature now on the desktop and the server room, and I want some thoroughly researched (requiring interviews, most likely) documented, verifiable, and practical information to back that up in order to give people reasons to move over (and overcome reasons not to), and not just anecdotes without hard facts.
I feel that Linux has really become mature on the desktop in the last 6-9 months, and something like this would be timely, topical, and extremely valuable to people trying to introduce Linux into the corporation (and possibly even the home).
I'd like to see a JavaScript textbook. I teach JavaScript at the local community college and most of the books out there are just trash. One absolute requirement would be to have a table of what features are available in which browsers as well as annotations next to each use of these features in the text.
Example (not necessarily correct):
document.images["imageName"] (Netscape 3.0+, Explorer 3.0+)
If you do decide to publish one, e-mail me and I'll get the head of the department to order some for the instructors. If we like the books, we will require that our students purchase them.
t'nera semordnilap
Try the java cookbook, I'm not sure but I think it's an animal people book. Basically lays out a problem and then solves it.
Some thoughts (most of which I see now others have mentioned):
1. There are a number of languages out there with sizeable user populations: C, C++, Java, Perl, Python. While the market for intros or overviews to these languages is crowded, books that do a good job covering applications of these languages to specific domains are rarer and can be very useful.
2. "Missing Manual"-type books are often very useful, since official application documentation is generally so weak.
3. As others have mentioned, books that provide an overview of available resources would be useful -- how about "The 100 Applications Every Linux User Should be Familar With", with several pages describing each?
4. Books that provide architecture overviews of open-source projects would also be useful -- not user guides and not Coriolis-type line-by-line black books.
5. Books that whip-up various Linux HOWTOs into "professional" level documentation.
As much as I hate it, Microsoft's .NET Framework is here. My company is owned by...errr, I mean sold on Microsoft, and we are changing our development environment to ASP.NET using VB.NET. Part of the problem of being early adopters is there isn't a lot of good documentation out there for the Final release of the .NET Framework. Stuff that I wrote using Visual Studio.NET Beta 2 inevitably broke when we downloaded the freshly released gold version of Visual Studio.NET. I would like a book that utilizes real world problems in teaching you how to use the .NET Framework within VB.NET and ASP.NET, and I would like that book to be in my hands and not on a hard drive. :-)
What books do I want? Stuff to help me figure out what the heck I'm doing while I make the big transition from the old Macintosh OS to the shiny new OS X.
I'm an old Mac hand, used to the simple point-and-click, but in the last month I've been seduced by the power of mySQL, php, PostFix, and who knows what else. I spend way too much time tracking down byzantine installation and configuration procedures, typing in weird commands that I mostly don't understand, but some unix geek tells me I need to do them. It sure would be nice to have some gentle but thorough introductions to these things so that I would understand them.
I'm not alone. I suspect there are a lot of us naive Mac people who are blundering along, ripe for the picking.
I can't really say what topics should be covered, but one thing we all notice is the structure of a tech book:
:)
Intro - History of [book topic]
Chapter 1 - Hello World
Chapter 2 - Strings
Chapter 3 - I can't maintain structure..losing....target...
Index
I hate the books that cover the whole 9 yards (unless it's a reference). Why not have a book such as, "writing a USB device driver for Linux 2.4", "Or, Effective web page templates using PHP on Windows". Then cut your prices by about 40%. Then I can stop waiting for hand-me-downs at Strands at start shopping at Borders again!
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
1) Topics covering the middle ground between Unix OS (Administration/Internals) books and Unix Programming books.
I would like to see a book in the line of 'Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment' that would document ld and ar and nm usages, for example, when and why do you use 'ld' to specify runtime search directories, or how do you use shared object versioning effectively. What does all of the output from 'nm' really mean. I think it could also go into the elf object format (perhaps others too). I would also like it to go into the specializations required for shared objects, covering topics such as implicit dependency etc. Dynamic loading is another topic that often falls through the cracks.
2) Automake/Autoconf/libtool
It would be really nice if these tools had some nice documentation on how to use them effectively for complex projects. It should probably contain an introduction to m4 macros. I have used these tools on a few projects and written some custom tests, but I don't know enough about them to fully utilize their capabilities. The best doc I have found on the subject is a book in progress called 'Developing software with GNU' by Eleftherios Gkioulekas. It is a good introduction/tutorial, but not completed. I would like to see an in depth reference work done on these tools.
so we've all read comments about buffer overflows and all the errors the OpenBSD folk find in code - how about a book telling us how to write code that avoids these kinds of problems?
-sciuro
Pick a topic.
Create a contest that allows anyone to write the book and then submit it (of course, in order for you to make some mulla, you would need complete rights to the book).
At a given date, whoever's book you like most, publish it.
The auther gets a book published!
I mean, why not?
OK, first you find a nice healthy tree and pull, cut or bite off some bark, say about the size of a 17 inch monitor. Curved screens are old fashioned so attack it with a saw or chisel or something then once it's flat attack it further with sandpaper so it's nice and smooth.
Now, take a projector and point it at the tree and read your books off that - Ha! Who needs dead trees when you can use LIVE Trees!!!
Still needs work on the portability stuff though...
--
Ministar nepretpostavljenih okolnosti
Me
I'm not a manager of any kind, but it seems to me that a lot of the griping that programmers do has a lot to do with management having either unrealistic or completely insane expectations of what a project can be capable of or when it can be finished. What about a book (series?) that explains things (sysadmin tasks, programming best practices, open source tools and their benefits/costs) in such a way as to give a guy or girl with an MBA enough of a vocabulary to deal with their programming staff in a halfway literate way.
I bet that this would at least sell like hotcakes, but it might change the world! What a great White Elephant gift...
A Transmission From PlanetJIM.[end trans]
Books on j2ee frameworks would be cool. Apache projects such as Struts/Velocity. Books on JBoss would definitely sell.
How about.. This would definitely sell. Using Struts with Jboss and using Postgres as the backend.
I would like to see a book on programming Gnome-DB.
Linux and FreeBSD needs a good book writing application programs that access a database. Gnome-DB is a great way to do this. Also, the book could discuss the internals of libgda/gnome-db for those wanting to enhance libgda/gnome-db.
One of the frustrating things for me at various times has been that if I'm looking at learning a new programming language, most of the books I seem to find are at the extremes - "Learn To Program using XYZ" or "XYZ Esoterica and Deep Internals". That's a big part of the reason I've gravitated toward the Nutshell books - to get good information without all the hand-holding.
fencepost
just a little off
One that I personally think is very timely would be one on using Linux and/or Open-Source in the classroom. I'm thinking specifically for K12 usage, since that's where the really low budgets which OSS can help with typically are.
;-)
All you have to do is do a search on Google and you'll find tons of educational apps and utilities for Linux.
I personally have been working on some titles over at Tux4Kids, and have really seen the potential in the comments and feedback I've gotten from the project.
Hell, my wife, who's currently and elementary school teacher and has used Linux in the classroom for a couple of years now, would be very interrested in this sort of book (she could probably even write it! She'd be much better with words than I am
In depth SDL programming.... increasing performance with SDL, basic SDL tricks, How to do effects.
Basically teach someone who never touched graphic programming how to make a killer non GL graphics.
(Then make a book covering the GL graphics... wash spin repeat)
SDL really needs some decent books.. The one from loki is great to get someone started but it get's really thin on details really quick and the ngoes off on game design... I dont want game design I want more SDL...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
by Denise Ritche and Brian Kernighan.
good book. 250 pages. always easy to find what your looking for. more books should follow its example.
I DEFINITELY do want dead tree books. A computer screen just does not have the resolution of a well printed page, and after a day of programming I would much rather rest my eyes on a high definition page than a screen.
Another thing I hate about some of the books on the market (WROX especially) is how they are pieced together from 10+ different authors. There is no way such a presentation can present a topic coherently.
Finally I would like to see a bit more of the old school in computer books - more well thought out, extraodinarily clear yet not dumbed down exposition like we have in the classic K&R. I think the essence of quality writing is presenting a complex idea in a fashion that is precise, leads to deep understanding and does so in a minimum of unneeded jargon.
Finally, don't shovel in content to make the book thick when said content (i.e. language specs) is not the direct subject of the book. We have to carry these things around, AND we don't have infinite shelf space.
I'm a big fan of the "Effective"-style books (Effective C++, Effective STL, Effective TCP/IP Programming). They don't try to cover the subject comprehensively, just highlight some key points and tips.
/.)
Basically, just stand out from the crowd by doing something other than the old: this is an array, this is a linked list, here are the networking layers, blah blah blah. I want something I can use over and over and can easily reference. Perl Cookbook is another good one.
BTW, First Post! (Really, it's my first post ever on
Please, for the love of god, would someone write a good book on AIX 5 System Administration???
I'd like to see something that would show computer literate people how to use graphics programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc).
There are plenty of books that talk about computer principles to people who know graphical principles, but I haven't seen anything that tells people how to use graphics software who know how to select stuff from menus but don't know how to point a pen.
I know there are books about drawing, but I want to see drawing oriented towards computers. As far as I know, there are still no books like this, but I think we programmer types could use a dose of art instruction tailored for us.
Thoughts?
D
LDAP and how to make it work for the things I want ie auth for 2000 users plus updating from samba and pam
Samba and NT/2000/XP the docs are far far behind the code which we actually run thou we have had a lot of trial and error stuff to get through
I present to you the book that is more than 1000 page thick, doesn't have enought wide space, extremly useful yet minimalistic: The C++ programming language by Stroustrup.
I have not met anyone who read this book cover to cover.
A book like this needs to be twenty 200-page books instead, with white space lavishly used and some content repeated a few times throughout. For instance, the stream classes deserver a book of 200 page themselves, and mentioned at least two other times in the series.
It will be great if Mr. Stroustrup himself will take it on.
hopefully it will work, i have been buying thier HTML CDs as i like certain topics (like programming languages) covered online since your going to be on a computer while reading them anyway. its much more convienient then dead trees, and doesent kill trees. html books do not inconvience the users as ebooks do. (for example, i would have to install windows just to read it)
books on theory etc, i still prefer as dead trees (except for the killing trees part)
Allow me to let you inside to have a peak at my insanity. #include using namespace std;
Chapter 1
It all started when I worked at IBM PSD (Printing Systems Div,) formerly Pennet, and I think it had another name at one time. It's the printing group. We pretty much did the heavy lifting and the stable cleaning of the print business: bills, checks, forms, stuff you don't like to get in the mail usuall, that type stuff was our bread and butter. Being the young and spunky turk that I was, I wanted more. Since the idea was pretty much killed by the then VP I will share it here.
I was working on a large distributed print managment system that is essentially a database of printing devices and "jobs." It's all the standard stuff, bullet proof, fast (it really wasn't but it was good enough) robust, scales to inifinity (not really, but close enough) etc.. And huge pains were put in to making this thing distributed. The real deal, DCE and a hand-rolled object broker (more or less, it was around the time corba was getting hip) and so you could have machines that were dedicated to jobs or machines that were dedicated to devices or any possible combination. That's the technology, the use is printing boring shit out. It has one of the best print managment engines in the world under it and it's generally used for stuff that doesn't matter so much (grand scheme of things) and ultimately, if we're successful as a species, won't get printed out in too long.
My idea was to start signing deals with content providers, the book publishers, the people who own books but don't publish them, text books, magazines, journals, University thesis' even, etc.. Something an IBM could do. Then we ink a deal with Kinkos and whatever other "print houses" are out there and then we build a huge distributed Infoprint manager system that includes a database full of all the books and a device server in each Kinkos. My vision is to get the content in to some liquid form and then allow the end user to control, if possible and then let demand control printing. If an article is popular it will get bought more. You want an article, you can search the online database, order it made and go pick up a copy at the nearest kinkos, in the format you desire. Since IBM would control the whole thing (or some company they could create) the IP would be secure, people would get paid on a per copy basis and the end user would be better served. It has been my experiences that certain types of information is published but it doesn't become easy to get to. As the technology progresses the data would be in a form that would allow us to move with it, develop online books, etc.. The authors and publishers could still have a degree of control over things, they'd get paid and the guys who want access to stuff could get it without traveling to 10 libraries all over the land to find one that has it. Alas, I was ahead of my time or underestimated the difficulty in producing such an app. I felt that it was a good way to really use IBM technology for something that might be one of the most important things we could possibly do. I still kind of wish I had all my college text books bound in 3 ring binders with extra wide margines for notes... And there are still at least a dozen articles I want to read but the local university doesn't have them around any more..
Chapter 2
Fast forward a couple years. I got out of the printing business, been doing other stuff. I read more books now. I wish I had a copy of Stevens, online, a copy of Stroustrup, online, and there are a few dozen online "books" I want printed out.
My vision is the same, I think every book that ever was should be online and available for purchase but I also want a different kind of book now.
Books in print aren't going away real quick. It's just too easy, portable and nice. There is something deep inside that just feels right about a book and actually "having it." Online books kick much ass as well, there is nothing like searching through a book to find that passage you knew you read. Physical books let you draw in them, hilite things, write notes. Online books can be hypertexted and who knows all the cool stuff you can find by following links. I've got this vision of something that crosses that divide.
Kind of what I imagine is something like an online book with a docbook backend and a moderated weblog or wiki. So you'd write a book and it's digital (oh, what I didn't say in my long IBM story that I should have is that in the past 20 years or so pretty much all publishing is digital, some people don't know that but you can't make a book anymore unless it's in digital form at some point) You've got this book then you put it online, for fee or for free, it doesn't matter. You also print it for purchase, printed version should come with a CD copy of the online version. Then readers can go to the online version and with something like wiki they can write notes, criticisms, links to things, etc.. Some publisher or editor type will moderate them to some degree. Then for a minimal fee or for free I can get a "book version" of the book and notes, maybe a big PDF or something, whatever docbook makes. Periodically the publisher can republish with the new notes and such. I guess the way I see it is that the book can sort of become a little more dynamic and living while you still can have a bound printed copy of it made up periodically and you have an online copy for searching through. It's kind of like faq-o-matic meets wiki meets weblog meets docbook.
I can think that for technical books it would be marvelous. Examples and samples could be added by readers. You could write a book and only include small code samples (good books only have small ones) but in the online version you could have bigger ones. New ideas could be presented. Ideas could be discussed as needed for clearity. At the same time, the original work of the author would be the core and could (and should) stay that way. It would almost be like an opensource project for books, there would still be a central core that was original though. You would be able to filter the additions in various ways. It would take a pretty radical shift in thought for some, but I think something like that could be critical as we a mass more and more knowledge and information that we need to preserve and pass on to future generations.
Essentially the book would come in 2 forms, bound and online. The online part would allow annotations, extra content, etc.. Then as I see fit, I could reprint the online version with various annotations, filtered to my liking.
...is Scott Meyers' Effective C++ CD-ROM. It's sold as a seperate product from the two dead tree books it contains - Effective C++ and More Effective C++ - but the author and publishers have really worked hard on maximising the use of hyperlinks, web integration and layout. Very impressive and very handy to tote around with you if you need to be on site or something. There's also lots of added bonus articles and cross-references too. The cover claims you're never more than two clicks away from finding whatever you want to know about C++ - which I found is - amazingly enough - true.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
1) We have currently some fresh events in the version-control software. Bitkeeper, arch, subversion are or soon will be competing with CVS
...) would probably sell some copies.
(one can also mention aegis). Seems one can _start_ gathering data for the new book about version control (to be published when subversion reaches 1.0).
2) The good book about bugtrackers (bugzilla, jitterbug,
3) It really is good time to publish some book about ant.
I've always wanted a book like this:
A large, ornately hand decorated, leather-bound hardcover UNIX manual, with "illuminated" pages, similar to medieval manuscripts. Beautiful margain decorations, stories, code examples, instructions on everything imaginable from LDAP to the art of regexp.. Just a large compendium of several commonly referenced books, manuals, HOWTOs, etc.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
How about a programming book bound in leather with steel clasps on it. The text would be printed in a creepy old-english style font. Just have the whole thing formatted and put together as if it were some archaic book on black magic, but in reality it would be a book on advanced perl (or something). I would buy such a book just for the novelty factor and I think lots of other people would to.
What I would have called the company up to say if it hadn't been based in Taiwan: Hello? I DON'T HAVE A DAMN COMPUTER! HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO READ THIS MANUAL?!?
It's just a good thing that I had no trouble whatsoever installing the board. (It was a Shuttle 555A, still going after 5 or 6 years. It's now my wife's, who uses it for nothing but word processing and websurfing.)
And the brethren went away edified.
I would like to see a book on MONO, Ximian's open version of .NET
Just sticking within open source Web based applications, especially with the XML generation starting to matter, the vacuum of informed guidance on technology combination and choice slows us down more than anything else ... especially seeing our tiny team is never going to have equal access to all possible skills.
This starts out with such perennial issues as what to put in a database and what to put in the file system? What to implement at the server, in the client's browser script, or in applets? What kinds of support tasks are best left in shell scripts and at what point might it be better to commit them to Perl. Or what to consign to ModPerl rather than normal Perl modules. And double many of these questions for when we really can combine SVG with XHTML in widely usable Web pages/applications.
While these kind of choices need to be made at the design stage, they might best work when coupled with enough basic how to information to encourage confidence in a team's ability to see them through to end game, with particular emphasis on how to find and integrate available resources.
There are so many combinations, particularly if we extend consideration to the big end of application development or to widely used proprietary technologies, than there should be potential for a whole series of books on subsets selected with an eye to what combinations actually get used in the real world. My guess is that they might be best presented in the slightly shorter, more readable, sans CD format that Damien Conway aspired to in Object Oriented Perl.
Personally, I'm as happy to have stuff I read once on screen as on dead trees, unless it's the kind of stuff I want to read on trains or on holidays, but stuff I need to keep returning to usually works best in books.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
There's too much catering to the lowest common denominator (e.g, "variables hold values that can change, whereas constants..."), and often too much padding with example source code. (I like examples, but I prefer brief, self-contained ones to large built-upon-all-the-preceding-chapters ones.)
Most narrow-focus books (e.g, LDAP) really have no excuse for being any fatter than the classic Kernighan and Ritchie C book. Wide-focus books (e.g., .Net, Perl 6) may need to be larger, but shouldn't be that much larger.
Given a shelfful of books on a given topic, I'll pick the thinnest one that seems adequately complete and well-written. If I later need a "complete reference" type of book, I'll buy that separately -- but I'll want it to be reference-oriented, not 900 pages of tutorial and fluff.
Printed, not electronic, although an electronic insert (CD/DVD of PDF, RTF, HTML, ..., but NOT M$-anything) is often a useful inclusion.
.NET docs, or a Mono book by Miguel, since that's what I'll write code for?
I also like to help Open Source creators, or, at least, believe that I do, by buying books about tools (PGP, GIMP, etc.) that look like the creators will get some cut of the book's price.
#1 Programming languages/environments by the creator(s). I want to know how the tool was envisioned by its creator(s). Should I get the M$
#2 Better-than-"Howto"s. I could use a good Sawfish book, right now, as I run it bare (no Gnome or KDE), to avoid clutter on my desktop.
really would love a good book on hacking Mozilla, or StarOffice, or GIMP. Why are there no good open source application books on understanding the code? A book for programmers that guides us on everything from the structure of the application, to build tips and tricks, areas that need testing, and how to submit a proper test, and the nuances of the community (so I don't feel like such a vile newbie when I get started). Something that helps me get a decent foundation before I dive head first into the middle of threads that make no sence to the uninitated.
There are lots of books for hacking the Linux kernal and writing Linux drivers, but almost none on applications.
I think you're right on there about functional languages. The only book I've stumbled over that may head in that direction is "The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia" by Paul Hudak http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521644089 and FWIW, it's copyright June of 2000. I don't own it but was thinking of picking it up soon to play with since my exposure to FP in college was as you well stated; "way off in theory-land".:) I've not been too inspired to dig into functional programming for that reason, but this book at least sound like something fun to play and learn with it.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
The book I will love to buy will be an language reference book. who list all the subroutines, functions, methods, class, etc., reference of a language and not the mother-want-to-learn-C book where, author said : If you want to have you name writted in the screen to this "hello world" program...
Some suggestions:
:-)
:p Should be a small book :-)
1. History and evolution of the linux kernel
This one has the advantage that you can continue
to release updates frequently
2. A book explaining the differences between the
various windows 2000 and windows XP (and all their various editions).
3. Windows 2000 networking for linux hackers.
"How is masquerading called in w2k terms and where do you have to click to enable it ? "
Or disable it for that matters when the installation chose to enable it for you.
And please work out some decent examples and
not your everyday loser book that gives the name
of a textfield and then repeats the name without
explaining what it really does and how it fits in
the big scheme of things. If anyone really knows
what that is ofcourse, when speaking of windows.
4. Linux and PCs from scratch for seniors. I want to teach my parents how to use a PC and
linux, but i dont know where to start.
Cookbooks are always popular. How about: "50 ways to serve a spammer"
Seems to me the publishing industry might want to look at a way to speed up their business cycle, so they can get books about new tech on the market before it become's old tech. Although I'm sure the longest pole in the tent is the actual writing-editing cycle, are there opportunities for innovation on the printing and distribution side? I know I'd often overlook a lot of design and craftmanship "flaws" if that meant I could buy the book a month earlier.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I want to be able to have the same technology books available on tape as are available in print. I want to be able to drive to work and listen to SNMP for dummies. I want to drive home after a long day of dealing with written documentation and listen to CCNA turorials. Surely there are others out there that would like the same. How about a book/tape combo? That way you could listen to the tape then when you get to the office or home or wherever you can whip out the book and refer to the section that you wanted to look over again?
No todo lo que es oro brilla
OReilly-type books are usually good, but as a university student, I say they usually fall short of the theoretical side of computer science.
What about a good nice mix of the two? Algorithmic design and software engineering with a down-to-earth approach and some code to play with the algorithms/software project...
http://www.christianlavoie.com
I like dead tree books with wide writeable margins that don't weigh so much they break my wrists as I lay in the bathtub taking a nice soak because all the geek guys are too wimpy to ask a woman out.
tree books work much better in bathtubs than pdf or ebooks: drop the book in the tub and it just expands and the pages stick together. YOu don't get similar results with anything electric.
Books by only one or two authors please. The books written by several people tend to lack cohesion.
Example code is good. i almost never used the attached cdroms.
more python books aimed at GUI and desktop coding (but not GNOME or KDE specific).
a book about gnupg
an emacs book that is actually current
graphics programming for those without a math degree
X Window programming that is not really high level (ala GNOME or KDE) somthing like coding with Xlib
That has not been my experience. ORA books have some faults but my experience has been that the production values are far better than average.
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
From a minimal fresh install of Linux
To an identical fresh install of the same Linux with the kernel built from the sources (with a comments-only edit to one of the source files), and
Build a set of install/source disks identical to the distribution except for the modified kernel and kernel sources.
For the latest release of each of the common Linux distributions available to the authors in time to be included in the book.
This is something the distribution packagers (Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake, etc.) SHOULD provide with the distribution.
I don't know about the others. But Red Hat provides adequate documentation to get a bare PC loaded to the point of displaying a login screen. And then their documentation just stops. And their prepaid support ALSO stops at that point. No help for setting up devices, networks, printers, or what-have-you. No explanation of the internals of their proprietary install software (or translation between it and the edit-config-file, build from scratch approach). NOTHING to walk you through applying security patches (just an enormous man page for RPM). And especially NOTHING on how to build a kernel. (But attempting to build the kernel from the supplied sources according to the usual rules dies.)
So there's a big learning curve before somebody new to Linux can do "hello kernel world". And there's no easy bridge from the stock install of the packaged release to a kernel build from the sources.
(There's also no easy bridge between the administration tools to the configuration file changes that result from poking a control. Cookbooks to get people started, and manuals describing what's going on behind the scenes, would also be grist for books. But that's a separate issue.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yes! Seconded (or is that sixth'ed by now)
I'd like to see a good introductory book on directory services. Should cover theory, simple examples, show how the structure looks, and then get into more complex issues, such as schemas. Must cover the more popular LDAP servers, such as novell's NDS, M$'s Active Directory, Cisco's Directory Enabled Networking, and that new Oracle thingy.
I'd like to see a book on effectively using LDAP tools for day to day creation, administration, and auditing of directory services. All the tools, from all the main players. Get into complex relationships between systems, domain delegation, authentication, forests, replication, security models. Give working examples. Show how WBEM uses LDAP hierarchies to configure and keep track of all the equipment and services within an organisation.
And a series of advanced reference books, one for each major implementaion of a DS. Some of those exist right now, but none seem to be great.
the AC
I've got a bunch of other ideas, see my top level post way further down
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I'd bet that the first book on OpenBSD will sell out in a flash. Forward by Theo himself, where he says "I'd read _this_ book if I wanted to get smart about OpenBSD"
OpenBSD says read the man pages, but if a Windows convert gets started, he has to struggle through man afterboot and the rest. Maybe get Nick Holland to write it. I'd buy 4 for people at work!
Please, don't make me waste my money:
- I DON'T want useless CD-ROMs
- I DON'T want useless screenshots
And from the top of my head, some(a bit obscure)
spots that I think need to be filled:
- Jakarta Java based tools(Ant, Velocity, Log4J, Tomcat, BCEL, James, Turbine, etc.)
- OpenBSD/NetBSD
- Microkernel designs(Hurd, Mach*, L4, EROS, etc.)
Best regards
\\Uriel
P.S.: And of course, books should be "dead-tree"!
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
How about a wxWindows book? There are a bunch of little tutorials on the web, but no dead tree tutorial book or API reference. There are a bunch of people interested in contributing here.
I'd be interested in some good books about functional programming. There's an O'Reilly book on OCaml, but it's only in French. Seems to me there's at least a small market for books on OCaml and perhaps common lisp.
Ya know, for a little change of pace...
exactly my thoughts...
elimination of stupid buzz words wold be wonderful...
no more:
-Advanced
-Bible
-Easy
-Super Bible(actually a good series, stupid name though)
-Unleashed
-Exposed
-Teach Yourself
-A practical guide
-Black Book
none of these tell me anything about the actual content, what ends up happening, it I flip to the introduction and read,(as was said) "...is beyond the scope of this book...". So I get frusterated, and walk over to the O'Reilly Section. Also(someone already said this, but it is a great idea): A series on indexed language specific algorithoms. Also, the index is the most important part of a book for me...if the "S" section isnt at least 3 pages, I move on.
________________
"A man prepared who hesitates, is lost." -Dante The Divine Comedy: Inferno Canto XXVIII, 99
IMO, the book I'm hoping to see published would be "Management for Dummies^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Managers".
I have heard many horror stories of BWIs (Bosses With Ideas) that couldn't buy a clue. Maybe they'll be able to if the book were released.
A C# book that's not focused on .NET, but rather, on C# and CLR.
Please!
I want a book that can show me that C# and the CLR aren't just PR tools for MS.
I want an intelligent, platform-neutral C# and CLR book.
I've spent about $1000 on books from ArtechHouse last year. All of them were about electromagnetism, antennas, EM simulation (well, that one is programming related). What I need are books that take very esoteric subjects in electronics, physics, and math, and put the subject matter into an easy to understand format, but yet not be cursory or condescending. Its a very tough act to follow through on. C. Balanis is one author who does it well (Wiley).
I would love to see a book written by the author of a well known and used 3D engine. I realize that most of the head game programming guru's are extremely busy, but if one of them took 6 months off to write a book with EACH line of their engine documented/explained, and how to implement it, the book would sell millions. I think that if Carmack or Sweeny wrote a book about the QuakeII/UT engine, people would eat it up in a second. I know that the QII engine source is out, but its only documented via comments.
That's the book I would like to see. O'Reilly should publish it, seeing as they have really good luck getting the programmers of the original code to write a book (Larry Wall comes to mind seeing as he is a linguist).
-Vic
I was faced with the decision, back in early 1999, of which OS to use for a new colocated server, and I tried Linux. The various books on Linux were adequate (not ideal) for teaching Linux, but it was quite frustrating that there was NO possible way to relate my knowledge of MS-DOS and Windows to the new environment. This meant that I'd essentially need to start completely from 'scratch' if I intended to set up a Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL server. After poking and prodding a little, and asking for some advice from some folks familiar with Linux, I concluded that I'd need to spend over 1,000 hours to learn Linux and Apache and PHP and MySQL and Bind and everything else.
In contrast, with my existing knowledge of Windows, I could spend $1,500 on a license for Windows NT Server, use the Windows driver for Microsoft Access, learn IIS Administration using some well-written books, and have my first server up and running in about 40 hours.
I went through the same experience when I was in charge of choosing the OS to be used in developing an e-commerce site: for Linux, we would need to hire "gurus," and our founders would be unable to poke under the hood -- but with Windoze, bad as it is, we could make sense of what was going on and we could even tell sometimes when our outside developers were feeding us bullsh*t.
Of course, someone with a Unix background would face the exact same problem migrating to Windows, and the learning curve might be just as bad (but maybe not, since even the most dedicated Linux user has probably been exposed to Windows).
So yes, give us a book about "Linux Desktop for Windows folk", plus a separate book on "Linux Servers for Windows Server Regufees" (maybe it's a family of books, if you separate "Apache for IIS users" and "MySQL for Microsoft SQL Server administrators").
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
If O'Reilly is reading this article, I'd like an updated version of Systems Performance Tuning (including Linux), which has a big lot of flow charts (ie. if your system is slow, then determine bottleneck (insert instructions here); if it is memory/cpu/network/whatever then go to page xx).
:)
I'd buy a very good, very long book that summarizes programming, databases, computer science, system design, data modeling, networking, the Internet, relevant vendors and technologies, open source, terminology, career paths, and computer history.
You know, basically something that a newbie to the field like myself could read for a comprehensive overview (with lots of references).
Maybe each section could be edited or written by a big name in that field rather than hoping that one person alone could handle such a diverse array of subjects.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
Rule engines and expert systems implemented in languages OTHER than Lisp or Prolog!!!!!!!
Also more LDAP titles (with a linux focus!).
A real world followup to Sam Halabi's Internet Routing Architectures. Talk to the BGP4 experts at all the major carriers and big to mid-sized ISPs, and document what they do in the day-to-day operations of their border routers. Troubleshooting, planning, tricks and tips, accepted best practices, anecdotes, funny stories, interviews. I keep meeting newly minted CCNA's who find themselves in charge of a dozen big border routers, and have no real experience on what to do. This wouldn't be a huge market (there are only 40,000 AS'es currently in operation), but it would certainly be useful.
:-)
A book on IPv6 routing, and BGPv5. Ciscopress is already working on them, but certainly there will be a market within a year for non-ciscopress books.
Negotiating Telecommunication Links. From intro to advanced level on the ins-and-outs of approaching telecoms carriers to lease capacity. A whole section on what can be leased, the actual capacities, what work is required (like to pull a fibre to your basement), explain distance vs. traffic costs. Then a whole section on basic negotiation skills, how to set up and run a negotiation bootcamp for practice, common terms, pitfalls, how to assemble a negotiation team (techie, lawyer, finance, CxO). Then a section on legal tips, example contract clauses, service level agreements, agressive penalty clauses, and a few war stories from battle scarred telecom admins.
How to keep your CV/resume up to date for dummies. Oh, wait, there's already thousands of those
the AC
Tomorrow I'll think of another couple things I can't find books on
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Nobody seems to have made a point of praising this editorial /. request, which is much more interesting, amusing, and relevant than many of the threads that show up here. Kudos all around.
/. killed my link.. blah
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/059600117 7/ qid=1013050700/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/002-6023155-26328 66
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I read a ton of fiction on my Palm. Never heard of anyone putting a technical book out in such a format though. Dead trees are fine as long as what you print isn't outdated by the time it hits the shelf. Otherwise whats the point? I could get more up to date info off the web.
How about books for newbies on programming with usefull examples... It would be nice to have "here's how to write a for loop, this is what it does, and here's a common use for it." I have drudged through several books on C, and they all lay out the language, but not how to use it, especially not for someone who has not programed before.
Dead trees are more convenient for learning, but (free) on-line docs are just as useful!
How about a *GOOD* book on ADO programming using C++??? Right now, documentation on doing this is extremely sparse, and what docs there are are confusing and/or poorly written, to the point of being useless.
Considering that there are like three entirely different ways to use ADO in C++, it's confusing as hell piecing together what you need to know, from documentation that assumes you're using VB and only gives a token nod to C++ programmers.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
There are millions of "Learn Programming X in <timeframe>" or "Massive OS XII under the hood" books. Yours will only be the million and oneth.
But write books detailing individual projects, of real-world complexity and depth and I think you will see those fly off the shelves.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Dead tree books, YES! Definitely. E-books have their place, but the bulk of my reading will always be done on good ole paper.
As for topics, how 'bout:
More books on Lisp, Prolog, Scheme, and Eiffel.
More books on AI programming, especially ones focusing on AI programming in C++.
Something similiar to the (now out of print, I believe ) old book "Build Your Own 32 Bit Operating System In C++."
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Dead tree books are essential -- at least until tablet PCs are ubiquitous and cheap enough that I can have several laying out on my desk at once. But, please, give us books with good bindings, especially references that get more than a read-through. Those -- even in paperback form -- should be sewn in signatures. My dog-eared copy of the "perfect bound" Perl in a Nutshell is coming apart at the spine, and the pages are starting to fall out. Spiral-bound books are nice too, but they don't shelve very neatly, and there's no spine to print a title on.
Personally I am very sick of all the programming books that treat me like an idiot! And NO I'm not just talking about "Complete Idiot's Guide" stuff.
Say for instance I buy a beginners guide to Java. The second or third chapter will be about loops, and instead of just explaining the syntax of a Java loop, it spends an ENTIRE chapter explaining what a loop is, and the difference between an UNTIL loop and a WHILE loop.
Give be a break!
Just because I don't know Java doesn't mean that I don't understand basic programming conventions. Isn't it safe to assume that if a person is going to buy a huge "bible" of a book, that they know at least one other language!
The best example of what I want to see more of in books is in "PHP and MySQL" by sams publishing. Not only does it NOT assume that you are an idiot, the CD included all the code used in the book, AND the entire book in PDF.
this is perfect! It saves me so much time when I am trying to look something up because if I forget how to make an array in PHP, if I go to the array chapter, I don't have to sift through 20 pages of crap explaining to me what an array is, the first page of the chapter is a brief explanation of an array, and the second page shows the syntax. I love it! AND I can keep the PDA file around for quick reference in case I don't have the book with me!
I hope more books will follow that example.
It is conceivable that the book is nearly ready at least to release to O'Reilly, and I gather that they intend to make it somewhat freely available...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
** Mini pocket sized books **
.Net languages, Linux, Palm, Pocket PC 2002 and a whole lots more would be great in a mini size like those.
The company with the animlas has dropped the ball in one area. Those little pocket size books that go with you to the john, Dr. office or can be smuggled on vacation. Well they don't support a wide enough range of titles. Java, Cold Fusion, all the
Nice to see your looking to the customer for input
Jim
Dead trees look better on other dead trees then CDs do (much less an ethernet port).
Being a college instructor, I need books on my shelf that people will assume I've read to improve my standing in the tribe.
For $49.99 I want to simplt open the book and know how to do what is in it.
No more Thinking In Java. I want to _know_ Java. I want to be an expert immediately. I don't want to read anything. I don't wat to have to know anything. I want to open the book and simply have the information flashed to my brain.
That's what kind of book I want.
This
I love the dead tree variety of book..
With any CS related book, its good to have a book that both teaches and also lends itself well as a quick reference manual as well. Given a choice in books, I always buy the kind that work both as quick references and also serve to teach.. These kinds of books usually have the concepts covered in alphabetical order, or by order of complexity or some other useful order, and they have large amounts of code samples and other illustrating examples.
Nothing is more annoying than to have a book discuss a concept and not have code sample showing the concept in action.
Dead tree.
... are you teaching a principle or selling a $600 program?
Show generic examples and possible / probable elaborations. Show reasoning and alternatives. Don't fudge.
Be very careful about both ordinary proofreading and technical accuracy. Don't skimp in either department. Best is to have a techie work in a team with the grammarian. And then have the techies work in teams, too. And then have a different grammarian go back over it and unobfuscate it. Simple words, short sentences wherever possible. NO unidentified TLA's or FLA's less than 10 years old.
Put the most important code in the book.
Keep code snippets short and highlight the point being illustrated with easy to see color.
Make the book lay flat. Comb binding is acceptable. Spiral is acceptable. Perfect binding is acceptable Cheap glue jobs don't cut it. I can't wrestle the book and type at the same time.
Use a font face that is EASY TO READ when showing code snippets. Don't make me guess if punctuation is a period/comma, colon/semi-colon, single-quote/back-tick/double-quote. Make certain I can tell the difference between {Il1i}, eh? I don't always have a loupe with me.
Do not rely on examples using advanced programs (such as Photoshop or Quark) to teach entry level subjects. If I see one more entry level book explaining how to use a $600 program to solve a design problem that HUNDREDS of free, shareware and open-source programs can solve, I think I am going to scream.
Make up your mind
You are going to charge me $40 and up. Last year I bought over $300 worth of tech books. Two of them get near-daily use. A couple others get occaisional use. The rest are shelf decoration. If you want your book read, don't skimp. If you want me to prefer your book on a topic over another publisher's offering, don't skimp. Do everything you can to make that book worth $40 or more. To me.
How about a book on algorithms for people who fell into programming?
I, for instance, fell into programming from International Affairs, and I've produced what I consider to be functional code, but I don't understand the hard core algorithmic love that some of the guys here seem to have.
I write effectively in Python, Java, and VB, but even pseudocode would be fine. Show me sorts, show me why they're important, and so on.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
My favorite, or at least one of my favorites, is the "C Puzzle Book", which demonstrates essential principles without trivial crap ad nauseum. If you're writing a book on a complex topic, assume your readers have the necessary basic skills (or else your book will be useless, regardless of the level of exegesis). Then exploit those skills as a platform for presenting new information.
In the case of the C Puzzle Book, C syntax is presented in the form of "figure out what this does" examples, a great and actually fun way to absorb the essential information. This editorial concept applies in other types of books -- you don't need to use the puzzle metaphor, so long as you assume your readers are starting from a particular level of skill/experience.
The trick is to know what to take for granted, of course. There are many intermediate-level books that assume the reader already knows most of the material -- wrong approach. Assuming that you're addressing an advanced technology or concept: Pretend you are presenting the concepts to a really smart, interested person from a different discipline; a linguist, say, or a physicist, who doesn't mind structured presentations and concise definitions, but doesn't need to be led by the hand through endless narrative.
Give the big picture, by all means, but skip the fluffy screen shots. Use good abstract diagrams and clear simple examples. Provide references, but assume these and many of the details will be obsolete within 6-12 months, when many of your run's copies will be sold, so be sure to focus on the important concepts and data sources, things that will transcend today's specifics. That's how you create a classic. And that's why K&R is still a good resource.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
This might take a few thousand pages, but it would be interesting to see an in-depth history of the linux kernel source code.
How about good books for very technical people who know pretty much diddly-squat about a topic, yet are not "dummies" books written for the average AOL user who doesn't know that the scroll wheel is also a middle mouse button? I constantly end up with computer books about a topic that make far too many unncessary references to semi-related stuff, and are written in a way that makes things unclear until having read the details about a topic multiple times.
A good example is O'Reilly's "Learning Python" by Lutz and Ascher. The text is good, but often gets off track with references to C, or assuming that the reader knows about object oriented programming, dragging down people new to OO coding and slowing the read. Keep the extra crap in obvious sidebars.
Also, please have the books looked over for errors and stupidity. A while back I picked up a book on Perl, in the interests of kindness I will not list the title. Many of the example Perl scripts found in the first chapters failed to execute properly, so I decided to check out the included CD which contained all the example code. Many filenames and directories on the CD included spaces; sort of moronic for a book intended for UNIX users (And yes, the examples on CD failed to execute properly, even with the supplied version of Perl that I compiled/installed.). This is not the only book I have seen like this.
As for paper/ebooks, offer the book online in PDF format at a discount, and include a copy of the book on CD-ROM with the paper copy. My favorite computer book of all time is "The UNIX System Administration Handbook." by Evi Nemeth and others. Unfortunately, it comes only in a paperback edition, and I had to start leaving my copy on the shelf above my desk because after falling in love with the book and hauling all over the place, it started falling apart. A heavy duty hardbound edition with a CDROM version supplied would have been such a better option.
Anyway, if you got this far, hope you enjoyed my $.02.
I swear, the technical publishing community must assume that programmers were born with C++ knowledge, because every book in creation assumes that one has that.
Two decades ago, computer user and programmer were pretty much synonmous. But today, things are different. Believe it or not, there are a lot newbies that are just now getting interested in software development after being computer users for quite a while. Looking for a book on Java programming that assumes no programming experience? You can probably find it, but it's not exactly easy.
Want a book to learn Mac OS X Cocoa programming? You better hope you have C++ or Java experience, otherwise you're simply out of luck. There are no entry-level Cocoa books. Same for WebObjects. Developers themselves aren't at all concerned about this, of course. They expect everyone to follow the same path they did.
Believe it or not, a lot of people do not want to read a *full* book before even cracking the book actually pertains to Mac OS X development. Additionally, not everyone is interested in become career software developers. They may just want to try it out as a hobby first. I hear from all sorts of people that just got Mac OS X and want to learn how to use those free development tools that Apple provides. There's no well-suited path for that. Why should you have to learn all sorts of general C theory when all you want to do is learn the stuff that pertains to Mac OS X development? This turns potential developers off, which is sad.
The Visual QuickStart series by Peachpit Press is the only series that I have seen that is consistently good at addressing this problem. As far as I can tell, the series is rapidly expanding.
Here's a crazy idea: how about a book that teaches you Java or C with the intention of writing Mac OS X apps? How about a Java servlet book that doesn't assume you're transitioning from C++? How about making this books readible and more practical than theory-oriented?
Lower the barrier to entry.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I think that's a rather cool idea, i really think it would sell, not only for it's novelty but it's usefulness.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
A good book on VHDL!
If anyone can reccomend a good book, I'm much appreciate it. Online help is also lacking, compared to C and other software languages. A verilog book would be nice too.
I'm tired of picking up a book on a programming language I'd like to learn and seeing the first 1/3 to 1/2 of it dedicated to subjects like "What's Programming?", "How Variables Work", and "Loops and YOU". How about programming books that are aimed at folks who already know HOW to program and just want to know how to program this particular language/API/whathaveyou. A great example of this is "Developer's Workshop to COM and ATL 3.0". It just dives off the deep end.
More like that!
It featured a dozen authors, but the book was coherent. The CD was PACKED full of AWSOME stuff (some was crap but not much). If not for a book like that, I would have never been writing my own games for Mac.
Apple announces MacOS X...
Uh-oh. Where is my Sound Manager? QuickDraw has been replaced? How do I guratentee I'll have enough CPU time (or does that even matter anymore)? How do I do refresh sync with the Vertical Retrace Manger now? Can Quartz do what I want and how?? OpenGL??? Networking???? INTERUPTS???? AUUUGHHH!! :-)
I hate wading through Apple's docs and source code. Dont' get me wrong, they're great if you know what you're looking for, but to go and teach yourself the entire thing? No, I'd rather have a nice big book, preferably written by people who know what they're doing. And can explain it in a manner that makes sense. You'd need chapters on (of course first off) good program design and applying it to games. Stuff about CoreGraphics and CoreAudio would be nice, along with how to generate sound and use raw frame buffers, and please, how do I sync to the damn VBL? Networking... how the hell do you even do that in MacOS X? Is OpenTransport even still there? OpenGL... been meaning to learn it, lots of example code out there...for Windows and Linux. Great, how does this appl to OS X? How should the screen/window be set up?
In case you couldn't tell, I'd rather not code in Carbon, as it's not as full featured as Cocca seems to be. Therefore, a chapter on the basics of Objective C would be nice as well.
Plus a million more questions I'm sure a ton of people want answered without wading through the Apple Source Vault Of Doom(TM) ;-)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I would like to see a (dead-tree) book that discusses Microsoft's ActiveDirectory, OpenLDAP and Kerberos and how to make them all work together (with or without Unix Services for Windows).
d bits kind of book.)
I work for a research group at a university which is predominately Windows 2000. I manage all the Linux boxes. I really would like to make the Linux boxes become "part of the fold" (Windows! eek!) in the most elegant way possible.
(Don't bother to flame me... Windows does useful things, Linux does other useful things. Besides, I don't have the authority to change things or even influence things much. Windows is not the anti-christ. Linux is not the savior. Would-be 15 year-old flamers: Bite me and get a job.)
If this book was available (as far as I can tell, it isn't) then I would buy it. (Yes, I know there's stuff out there, but not a one-stop-here's-how-you-do-it-plus-some-useful-ti
--
Mark Fassler
fsr-slash at monkeysoft dot net
The OpenSSL documentation is so cryptic (hmm, encrypted?). It'd be great to have a nice book for the programmer wanting to add SSL support to a generic network program.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
A quick search on bn.com and amazon.com turn up exactly one Procmail book, published just this past November. Why something that can be so powerful and complex hasn't had a book written about it before is beyond me.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
Most code is seen only by the person who wrote it and possibly a few others. Some code is really excellent and deserves to be seen by many. Identify some truely superb app and publish the source code along with commentary about it.
Something along the lines of "Lion's Commentary on UNIX with Source Code".
How To Rescue Websites from FrontPage
First Aid for FrontPage Plague
Fighting the FrontPage-IIS-IE Axis of Evil
I know HTML, JavaScript, etc, etc, backwards and forwards. I can do it in my sleep. BUT when it comes to MS-style clickety click dummy development, it is the hardest thing I've ever done! NS4/IE/Moz DHTML was a breeze compared to "user friendly" FrontPage.
Any other web developers out there working for schools? You probably know what I'm talking about. I have to use FP, because the teachers need to be able to make their own classroom web pages with it. The major horrors are FP Themes and FP Server Extensions (webbot gibberish). MS doesn't like mixed development environments. Try to use Dreamweaver (or anything!) to open a page made in FP. It's a horrific heap of code spew.
I am ball-and-chained to FP only temporarily (I'm out of this job once school's out), but there is always a market for books to help the poor souls stuck in FrontPage (I almost said DLL) Hell.
One note about what I'm doing about the situation... .htm pages in FP and have them #INCLUDEd (or something, I haven't worked out the details) and automagically appear in the navigation menus. I'm not far into it yet, so it may not be so simple. Any advice? Is there ASP code already out there to do this?
I'm trying to make a framework in ASP with templates to automate the navigation system based on the directory structure and files. Then, teachers can make their
It sounds to me like he's looking for a book on how to manipulate your boss.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Specially Mason.
I like books a lot. I want sturdy books that will be in my bookshelf in 5 years time. I like books that will still be useful in five years time. I don't *touch* buzz word books. I buy computer books on programming languages and platforms as a long term investment. I want something I can come back to and use for a long time.
I don't like programming books that get you to develop a single application over the course of the book (eg: C++ for dummies, which is yuck for many other reasons too. Prog. Python #1 did this a bit as well, and it feels laborious). I like little, powerful, varied, complete examples. Stuff you can type in that eloquently sums up an idea and gives you a grasp of the concept being discussed. For example: O'Reilly's Unix Systems Programming for SVR4 is packed with these! I don't even *use* SVR4ish platforms much, but bought the book because of all of its neat little programs that I had to try. It remains a useful reference for all sorts of generic C stuff too.
I don't like CDs attached to books - they're a waste of time. There is one exception to this - I'd buy a palm programming book if it could give me a CD of absolutely everything I needed to install PRC tools on my desktop and get coding. Setting up a PRC palm development environment is a pain and something I have yet to succeed at (it's possible I shouldn't be so stubborn in installing SDK4.0..)
Also nice is when they're laid out in a way that's classy, and leaves room for little helpful pencil notes (although not notes pointing out poor editing - see O'Reilley's Prog. the Be Operating System for examples of this..)
Believe with me, my saplings.
I'd like to see this modded up with not just +1 Funny mods, but also +1 Insightful. There is lots of evidence showing that we would all benefit more from utilizing hemp instead of dead trees. This is not some euphemism for legalizing Marijuana either. There is legitimate use to it. Also, I don't consider myself to be some left wing ultra environmentalist either. Some links:
Hemp Pulp and Paper Production
Why Hemp?
The Challenge of Making Hemp Paper (this is not just all pro-hemp paper, this gives a little bit more of a rounded view, with some discussion of disadvantages)
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
There's loads of books that teach you Java and assume you know C++. How about one that teaches you C(++) and assumes you know Java (or even Python?)? Not everyone eats, drinks and breathes C... And the books that teach you C++ and assume you don't know programming are not very useful either, 'cause if you skip the first 3 chapters, you might miss out on some of the useful stuff, but if you read them you'll be very bored 'cause they teach you programming and Object Orientation, which most Java programmers should know ;)
This is not a signature.
There have been several posts now calling for spiral binding. In case publishers are reading this for ideas, I just want to make the point that there are still many of us who do not like spiral binding. I like something that stacks well or fits on a shelf well. Spiral-bound books usually do not.
Auch.
How could I have left out that one.
Thank you, annyway. I guess I was just a few minutes late.
Books which outline the problems/issues/weaknesses of any specific language. I wanted to make a switch from C++ to Java and fortunately came across one such book written for Java(cant recall the name) It was very very helpfull indeed. I suggest there should be one such book for every language.
Voltaire: God is dead.
God: Voltaire is dead!
I get sent a stack of free books for evaluation (occasionally I lecture Java undergraduate courses) and the publishers are desperate to get a text adopted for a course. Fair enough. The thing is 90% of these books are absolute tat. They tend to be huge, un-technical with a lot of duplicated content.
... me - I prefer books that give information. Such as APIs, technical details (like well defined algorithms). If you must do the "teaching book" thing - make it work - and keep the waffle down (unlike this post).
I think that there is a real need in the Computer Science industry for technical references. One of the most useful books I own is Suns "Java Developer's Almanac" - the API in a book - fantastic. The worst - probably (a freebie) "Java by Dissection". Even students don't read these - okay they may buy them as they think that it will teach them Java - but they just end up copying the code and the text is too dull.
There is a real skill to creating "teaching" books - and the IT industry isn't particulary good at it. There is the idea that "big == better" which of course - it definately doesn't.
So
There is a big need for an introduction to linux development for c++ programmers. There is a cubic a**load for c programmers, but I can't find one with sufficient coverage for someone who knows nothing but ANSI C++.
I'm sorry. There is no need for books about computer stuff. All I need is a constat web connection.
Everything is out there...
I have bought a few Linux books and found one problem with them. They are only useful for one or two distributions. They describe the setup tools of that distro but not the config files these tools are operating on.
I have a general Unix book that I find 100% more useful, but probably there are differences in the way network support, boot process etc is done.
What I would like is book that explains first and foremost the "GNU/Linux" system, where the config files are, what they do, what to put in them. I say GNU/Linux here because the books I've seen already do a good job describing kernel compilation, it's the rest of the Unixness of the system that remains hidden.
How about a book on Verilog PLIs that costs UNDER $100...
I know how to do a whole bunch of useful stuff in tcl/tk and python.
Now I want to know how to do this in plain old C. One would expect such a book to cover at least 5 RealWorld(tm) examples of the hard bits... that means _not_ the how to build a UI in C stuff - there are a gazillion tutorials of how to use Motif,gtk+ in C - but the 'plumbing' bit. How do I get C to behave like the tcl part of tcl/tk? Show me how to use select(), popen() and signal() in a 'shell scripting' style role.
And as a complement to this, I would like to see an updated version Stevens' 'Advanced Unix Programming' released.
No you don't..
if stack.pop() = 42 then call b()
42=[b;!]?
>>++++[<++++++++++>]<++[-<->] #
Anyone should be able to understand, and write, the first, and thus most "normal" languages. The second is FALSE, and not quite as intuitive. =) The third is brainfuck2, and doesn't even contain an if-statement (since bf2 doesn't have if-statements). It also doesn't actually call "b", since bf2 doesn't have functions.. But it will (if I remembered the syntax right) leave currentbucket 0 if currentbucken started out as 42. (And anything non-0 if it didn't.)
There are four categories of books that seem to be under-represented:
1: XYZ to ABC guides, ala Perl to Python Migration or Java for Cobol programmers. Would be nice to see more in this vein -- e.g.: Microsoft ASP to PHP/Zope/mod_perl/whatever, Perl to Ruby, mySQL for MS SQL server admins, etc.
2: 'Cookbook' style programming guides. The Perl Cookbook should be the prototype -- just get someone to translate it all to Python, Scheme, whatever. Same idea for website development (or at least html).
3: Computer Science books for non-computer scientists. The Perl Journal used to have lots of nifty articles that talked about CS subjects, but applied them to the real world and made them accessible to a relatively wide audience. Dr. Dobbs has some similar articles, although they tend to get a bit more CS'ish. Algorithms in Perl is one take on this but still too textbookish, something with more narrative perhaps describing a specific project rather than a laundry list of all possibilities.
4: Software "craftsmanship" books -- ala The Pragmatic Programmer, or Programming Pearls. Cover more subjects than making string searches _really_ fast -- how about books like this that deal with "best practices" for setting up a datacenter, migrating to/from and/or co-exisiting with Unix and Mainframes, setting up scalable web sites, system administration. These are different from cookbooks in that they don't prescribe, they simply describe common circumstances and provide heuristics for dealing with them.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
No1 - Good Indexes.
No2 - Better Indexes.
A multipage contents is no replacement for a poor index; to many otherwise excellent books suffer from poor indexs, it's the second thing I check in the book store after reading the title.
I want a clear distinction between tutorial & reference books, and theory and practice. I should not need to open the cover to make this distinction. However when a concrete topic (specific Language/Topic/Product) is covered use standardised methodologies (ERD/UML etc) to illustrate & document the concepts in general. Avoid the authors own invented methodology (unless that is the topic of course).
Always include a CD/DVD, don't skimp on the cost, include the books text not just the source code.
Produce a cost effective Compendium's on topics, it's quite common for Publishers to produce 10+ Books on specific topic. If the series is particularly good, I might buy 3-4 of them however I'm unlikely to get the full set as seperate items, however if a bundle of all where available, I certainly those linked to my core skills. These should also be available on on a single CD/DVD. Keep these upto date and cost effective and I'm probably upgrading regularly.
I would like to see:
"Answers from the Perlmonks" or similar title with proceeds going to its upkeep, with a stationary server for the book. Contact vroom or post with contact info on the site for more feedback from a number of really experienced people who have wanted something like this for a long time.
Would save repetition by contributing to editing down the answers the monks have given for free. Also need more Perl books to solve problems, teach people, and reduce the amount of bad, security holed, or otherwise noxious code running around "with scissors" as one Monk puts it.
Would involve Perl Monks community, possibly could bring in some cool waves from the three open source funded scholars of Perl, and would generate by itself more material for the next edition. A vibrant, extremely useful community ready-made for the book not vice versa. Run the book by the monks and you'll get thoughtful proofreading in parallel, almost guaranteed.
Also I believe all books should come with the full text available on CD as well, or downloadable in plain text, possibly with an additional version in pdf or an open source format, all in a tar.bz2 archive (the latter of which is handled by WinRAR just fine).
Table of contents and other things should be available as a tab-separated file or some other format (maybe a Berkeley DB file) which would be 1) updateable with annotations and additions from readers downloaded from the website for free, 2) far more useful than what passes for an index in most books, and 3) gives readers a good reason to code and recode their own utilities to handle them.
I think this project would improve the state of programming in general, including standard level of competency, cost efficiency, creativity, realism, and humor.
90% of the books on the C/C++ shelves is about C++ programming (where I live). I really wish there where more C programming books.
I'd like to see something like Learning SQL with Open Source DBMSs. As someone who has recently learned SQL by applying the code in a fairly well known book to PostgreSQL and MySQL, I'd like to see a book that gives workable listings for these (and other Open Source) DBMSs.
paper books are great yes BUT not the ones which are a WHOLE tree When a book gets too large it is hard to find the inforamtion The great thing about the O'R books is that they arn't padded out.
All the O'Reilly books of which I am aware have seemed dis-organized and lacking in important information. In general, I think computer books are of very poor quality. Yes, it is true that O'Reilly books are often better than the alternative, if the alternative is to read sketchy documentation that comes with some open source software.
The city in which I live, Portland, Oregon, USA, has what is said to be the biggest bookstore in the world, Powell's. I went to Powell's technical bookstore and looked at about 20 books on Samba. ALL of them were very incomplete, as was easily proven by comparing them with each other. ALL of them were poorly written. Most assumed that you already knew something about Samba. And, Samba is an important subject; file serving Microsoft OS clients using Linux is a first step toward reducing dependence on closed source software.
The measure of good quality in technical books is whether the author has done everything he or she could possibly to make the subject easy for the reader. By that measure, very few technical books rate higher than 20%.
There are plenty of books that achieve their bulk with extensive source code listings. There is a high percentage that promise something on the cover that they don't deliver. Most indexes are of poor quality.
Next time you are in a technical bookstore, pick up books on unfamiliar software subjects. Turn to the first few pages. You will find that very few books have even one paragraph that introduces the subject to those who are new to it, that explains the importance of the subject, or that explains how the subject relates to other software.
Bush's education improvements were
Network servers (http,email,etc.), document storage/retrieval, backup, whatever people use it for with regard to business.
Something like an encyclopedia with entries like:
That would be a great book.
--Fred
I really like dead tree books when I am introducing myself to a new topic, but once I am past the beginning stage, I like the on-line book because it is typically easier to search for keywords. Even the best Indexes in dead tree books cannot compare.
What I want (and appreciate) even more than the above are books that do not regurgitate, or even blatenly copy, the examples and explanations from the help file or software company provided user manual. It makes me furious when I go to the help file and read an example or explanation that does not help me, and then go to a 21 Days, Bible, or animal book that I paid over $50.00 for and get the exact same explanation or example! You should only be publishing information that complements, (or at least explains a different way) the documentation provided by the software company.
I used Donald Alcock's Illustrating C (ANSI/IOS Verson) (Cambridge University Press: NY, 1992, ISBN 0-521-46821-3) on an 80C186 embedded project years ago and found it to be indispensible! The book has the just right amount of detail. I'd also like to see books like Illustrating C++ and (even better) Illustrating VHDL/Verilog (Skahill's classic VHDL for Programmable Logic comes close but it's outdated and full of errors.)
- Landscape like New Riders "... Magic" books (lay-flat with no special binding)
- non-moron step by step like Coriolis Visual Black books. (Also 2 colour printing good, 4 colour bad).
- Split style like Peachpit VQS, but not split between images and text, but between reference (outer half) and relevant cookbook "recipes" (gutter half).
More books about wireless networking. Building Wireless Community Networks was great, but it didn't have enough meat, and I was surprised how thin it was. It was more a manifesto, not that that is bad, au contraire.Why not publish the ultimate recursive manual, "How to Write Documentation (That is Interesting to Read, Informative and Does Not Insult Intelligence)"?
"Use Your Old Hardware" - what you really can do with old pc's, macs, routers, switches, printers etc. With honest advice of when to give it to a deserving cause or just chuck it. Lots of DLable binaries on the website for this book.
And ebooks? Wait till the hardware is
- waterproof to 50m
- OLED 1200 dpi display
- 100 Gb storage
- battery life is a week even with 50 hours 'reading' time
- and is given away like mobile phones when you sign up for a contract (think book clubs).
Final random thought - since many computer books have such a short shelf life, can you make them cheaper by using magazine printers? I will never touch my books on Photoshop 3 or Dreamweaver 2 ever again. But even if I did I have many old computer magazines that are as old, refered to more often, and are still in 'working order'. Cheaper texts for us, and cheaper returns for you.The books I tend to use most and am happiest buying are the small pocket guides. 90%+ of the time I'm looking a book because I already know the command I want to use but need to remind myself of the syntax or check on a rarely used option. I don't need an indepth discussion of how the command works, I just need a brief reminder.
For example, back in version 7 of the RDBMS Oracle supplied as part of the documentation set a little 70 odd page A5 book entitled "SQL Quick Reference" that just gave you a brief diagramatic explanation of the syntax of each command and a brief listing of the built in functions and the datadictionary tables and what they were contained. 6 years down the line it's the only book that lives permanently on my desk. If there was an 8i/9i equivelent I'd be first in the queue to buy it.
For anything over about 100 pages, ring/spiral bind it so it will lie flat.
Plenty of white space! I like to annotate.
Tie in web site for code examples and errata and a tie in mailing list/discussion board where I can post questions, comments and error reports. It doesn't matter if the author doesn't read the mailing list, although obviously it would be nice if someone from the publishers did to pick up error reports and identify possible improvments for the next edition (or even see what other books might be worthwhile publishing).
For the more 'Teach yourself' rather than quick reference type books, anecdotes. If I'm learning something then I want to know how it works in the real world, not just spurious academic examples.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
One thing that get me is the poor quality of the indexing in most technical books. I've grabbed one at random, and looking at 14 pages of index for 500 pages of text, I'd first think that the index was good. But let me quote an item:
Notice those six references to three pages. The whole second level of this index entry is unnecessary. It bulks the index, but it's fluff.
Personally, it's not that hard to find documentation on how to use a particular function/feature of a language or OS, but I think we need more books on Philosophy/Theory as well as some application so that we can get a broader look on how the languages/OS's actually work.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED BOOKS TO FOLLOW:
--Rebel Code: by Glen Moody [Story of GNU]
--Any book by W. Richard Stevens is a must have!!!
--The Art of Computer Programming: by Donald Knuth
The book Rebel Code teaches me about how Richard Stallman started the whole GNU Project. This greatly inspires me and gives me ideas for my own project. Not to mention that it also talks about how Andrew Tanenbaum wrote Minix OS and a book that came along with it called Operating Systems: Design and Implementation,and how Linus Torvalds ended up taking a class using Minix, which greatly influenced his creation of Linux.
Donald Knuth's book (enough said), goes very far in depth in algorithm efficiency and after reading that, you'll be writing your own STL classes, and creating new data structures yet to be invented.
Richard Stevens writes the best Unix books I've ever seen in my life, I'm sure you know him.
UNIX Network Programming, Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, etc.
I recommend you take a look at the way these guys developed books.
python >>>
reduce(lambda x,y:x+y,map(lambda x:chr(ord(x)^42),tuple('zS^BED\nX_FOY\x0b')))
I have a whole lot of books near at hand.
Some of them are concept references - for example, Don Box's Essential COM which end-to-end explains what COM is about. It's not easy reading, it's not 21 lessons, and it's a good solid useful book.
Some of them are task-oriented getting started books - I have a fair number of Dummies(tm) books, because they are generally a pretty fair introduction, with enough easy-to-follow examples to get me started quickly.
What I find less useful is the book that pretends to be one while being the other. That's often a book where the advanced stuff is completely wrapped in the author's idiosyncratic framework. Granted, that framework is on the CD -- but I don't want to use it for my projects.
If you are writing a book to assist people in getting certified *PLEASE* make an effort to match the material and particularly the sample tests that you are offering to the test that your author is trying to get his readers to pass. The disconnect between what these $50-70 exam books offer and what is actually tested is absolutely shameful. Publishers are simply PREYING on inexperienced people trying to get into our profession.
.chm files). I praise most publishers for maintinaing a very good (better than most other fields, actually) errata list on their website, although it should never be a substitute for good editing. All example code published should be pasted (not retyped) into a module and compiled. Beginners books should be *ultra-careful* about not using new terms before they have been defined (this is a giant failing of beginner computer books in my experience), and I second the complaints about the incomplete back-of-the-book indexes being incomplete.
We can (and should) debate the value of certification itself at another time, but given the current state of things, it is a valid submarket for a publisher to serve. Nevertheless, I am simply astonished that the amount of competition that pursues this market is not resulting in better quality work.
Beyond that, I share the group preference for smaller books (O'Reilly size) that come with an electronic format of some sort (personally, I am fond of
especially covering multiple platforms/OS and ipv4 interoperability.
For the last ten years or so, I've rarely worked on a system that was monolithic. The typical modern project, in my world at least, looks like several classic client-server systems tangled together.
Some layers that we built in the current one:
While I don't expect any book to deal with our architecture, I would like a really solid book that encompasses the wit and wisdom of building this kind of thing, in a repeatable fashion. I'm thinking of something like the patterns model, but applied to the making science out of the art of knowing where the right place to put a function is. Considerations like elegance and efficiency, and so on.
Is it unrealistic to think of a book on this? Are there no general principles learned yet?
My favorite books were these itty-bitty technical books. They were like 2 inches square and a few hundred pages. I recall math, physics, and chemistry versions. They packed a ton of info into a small space. Equations, formulas, definitions, etc. The keys are to keep the text short and tight, and well organized TableOfContents and Index to make look up easy.
These kind of books can be created on almost any tech topic. A good start would be one for every popular programming language. Maybe ones dedicated to operating systems.
You can't sell them for a fortune, but they are cheap to produce, and how often to people LOSE an eight pound refference and buy replacements?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I want books that will tell an educated ignoramus about the topic of the book.
I want computer books designed to let me fake my way through an interview on a certain topic. Errr. I want books that will let me evaluate a new technology / language that I have no experience with to see if I want to buy a big expensive book about it.
These books should be 60 - 120 pages long, of small format, and should cost $15. I want a good description of the design philosophy and target problems the tech / lang. addresses and a good intro.
I want to think to myself "Hmmm. I'm a little bit interested in
- C#
- Linux
- Database Architechture
- Some random thing
How about if I pick up the little bitty $8.99 book that I can read cover to cover in about 5 hours. Then I'll know if I should continue with some $40 - $70, 300 - 1200 page beast of a book that doesn't lend itself to light perusal."
If you could get a series of books like that going I think it would be rad. It would make it much easier to pick up csci stuff casually.
But updated to recent standards.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I counted at least a dozen typos/errors in Oualline's Practial C++ Programming book, which is bad, especially those in the code-snippets parts.
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
Paper books are a necessity. Random access, long life, no power required, and robust (a book with a bullet hole through it is still a book; a computer with a bullet hole through it is a doorstop). I find I need books which describe how to fix real-world problems, but aren't Dummies-level, for example "How to use an OpenGL rendering context inside an MFC GUI". Most of my personal library centers around cross-platform standards and APIs, especially for GUI development. I don't think that's entirely clear, but that's the best I can do before coffee. -B
In fact, the "animal" company has one, in French, and after inquiring by email, they aren't translating it to English!!!! ARRGHH!
-- John
This is may be off topic since I am not a programmer but I would love a book on Real Media. We got a ton of books on Windows Media, Quicktime and various MPEGs but I have not seen one book on Real Media. Not that it is some big mystery but some times documentation is nice. Of course I agree with the dead trees, smaller books with better info, spiral bindings ect.
-- No Comment
"Learning to live on half your salary while working twice as hard"
I think there are many projects out there which are *very* useful if you use them but are difficult to use due to poor documentation. These will possibly have more attention when the project is known more widely (and your book is out).
possible topics:
- Zope (yes, there are books already)
- GNUstep (still a major hassle to install, but interesting)
- WebObjects (from Apple - good product, but a serious lack of good books)
- MacOSX/Darwin from below (the Unix side, but the parts that differ from the way standard Unices do it)
- advanced Cocoa programming (the OReilly book is good but a little bit superficial)
- Programming Lotus Notes
- Web Applications using mod_(perl|python)
- don't forget the Lisp Implementor's Book (with code examples from CMUCL and OpenMCL)
- perhaps also an improved paper version of the Haskell standard documentation, together with some real-world examples (Wadler's Functional Programming is good, but a bit academic)
also:
- think about the expected background of the audience
- never ever want those written-in-21-days books
- Advanced Debian Administration .deb packages
Including :
* Making
* Performance tuning
* Advanced local / remote security
- Advanced PostgreSQL (Administration / Usage)
Including :
- Performance tuning apps
- Performance tuning servers
- Various types of extensions (gist indices etc..)
- Example backup & restore scripts and applications of these
Not including anything covered already in the excellent PostgreSQL "Introduction & concepts".
life+universe+everything=42
I consider myself only moderately technical but work with some very technical guys. I think that I'd be a better contributor at work if I could read a well written, interesting, and authoritative book for non-computer scientists on the weekend and use it during the week. Everybody gains.
I have a fair number, too. They give me the basic info that I need to get started, and sometimes they have useful tables and summary info that's not easily gleaned from on-line help (which I, being a tech writer, use rather extensively).
Reference: There aren't enough tech books that are pure (or fairly pure) references. The O'Reilly POSIX Programmer's Guide is a great example of a good reference. (In fact, the non-reference portions are, IMHO, so shallow that they could be removed without the book losing any value.)
Complete Reference Books: I've got a great little C/C++ programmer's reference, but it doesn't tell me what include file I need to get the thing I just looked up. This hinders its usefulness greatly.
Complex examples: Simple examples can be good, but often a simple example leaves you with no clue how to implement the more complex real-world task before you.
Paper: I may have two monitors, but I still don't have enough screen real estate. Paper has a lot going for it.
Electronic: The value of a reference book increases by an order of magnitude if it is paper and electronic. But the electronic version can't have any copy protection. (That's DRM for the younger generation.) I need to be able to slice and dice the content and build a custom search & extract program. A copy protected ebook is about as useful to me as an x86 binary on an Apple ][.
Good recommendations in the last couple of Ask /.s about OS X. Also, hang out on Apple's developer site and Macslash.com.
Lies about crimes
I speak several languages, from Basic to C++. I found Johnson's Elements of Programming With Perl to be the perfect introduction. After working through that, I find I can use a Pocket Reference to figure out how to do almost anything that I need to do.
p.s. Spiral binding would be wonderful.
There are plenty of how-to books on just about any technology X. I would rather see a book that begins with a problem (e.g., "I want a dynamic web-site connected to a database") and then shows how different technologies could solve the problem. Which ones are the easiest to implement? Which ones scale better? What do the different type of code look like? What were the problems for each technology? Case study kind of stuff, but not done by the software vendors.
I forgot to mention that the GCC manuals, including the Internals manual, are nightly regenerated into HTML and posted online: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/. Have fun!
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I buy plenty of books. They're nice to have. The books that I buy are rarely books like "Visual C++ 4.0 Programming;" something tied to a specific version gets obsolete quickly. The author also doesn't have much time to write it, so it usually ends up poorly writen (I might buy some of those if they were much cheaper, but I don't think it'd make economic sense to the publisher). I like nice, clear reference texts, much like those the animal guys publish. From my point of view, there's a shortage of books on all the current Gnome/GTK APIs, and the books that are there are pretty mediocre. It might be a too quickly evolving target to write an indepth book about, though... Linux kernel internals are now evolving less quickly, and those aren't all to well documented either. You'd need to find a competent author, though. The gcc architecture isn't too well documented either, come to think of it. Not terribly high volume, but it'd have a long sales life, with at most minor revisions, so you could make some cash there.
How about a subscription to a topic area. Let's say your company is going to publish 2 books / yr. on Java. And the street price for each is $40.00. You could offer a Java topic area subscription for $60/yr. This would give me access to benefits like a discussion board where the author(s) will participate and access to pre-release versions of the books. In particular I think access to pre-release copies of the books is interesting. That way I don't have to wait several months past GA for an update of my book on, for example, J2EE 1.4. Subscribers would also, of course, receive dead tree copies of the published editions.
Here are some:
1. LDAP application books. Yes, I said LDAP. There is a growing amount of data that is being stored in LDAP directory databases rather than Oracle (or other relational databases).
Therefore, application LDAP books will become more and more into vogue in a year. Afterall, look at how many Oracle books there are.
There is a relationship between amount of data in a type database and the amount of books written about that type of database. They both increase togeather at a given rate.
2. Peer-to-Peer for business. I have worked in business Internet communications for 6 years. Peer-to-Peer works and will work for business (in about a year.
Later...