Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

What Kind of Books do You Want?

Posted by Cliff on from the bending-the-ear-of-a-publisher dept.

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?"

9 of 920 comments (clear)

  1. What book do I need? by PoiBoy · · Score: 5, Funny
    Speaking both for myself and many other Slashdot readers, I really need the book An Idiot's Guide to Getting Laid Tonight.

    Moderators: That is a joke.

    --
    Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
    1. Re:What book do I need? by unformed · · Score: 5, Funny

      Moderators: That is a joke.

      Right. For you it might just be a joke; What about the rest of us who would actually buy -and- use such a book?

  2. I want to see: by Chundra · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. How about a book on self study by The+Wookie · · Score: 5, Funny


    called Teach Yourself Teaching Yourself In 21 Days In 21 Days

  4. Re:books with lots of pron by Chundra · · Score: 5, Funny

    I can just imagine what a doubly linked list would look like. I'm afraid. Very, very afraid.

  5. I want hemp books! by jordan_a · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  6. No no no - Dating with SQL by cryptochrome · · Score: 5, Funny

    SELECT first_name,phone_number FROM women WHERE easy='very' AND looks='good'

    --

    ---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?

    1. Re:No no no - Dating with SQL by NoMaster · · Score: 5, Funny

      SELECT first_name,phone_number FROM women WHERE easy='very' AND looks='good'

      Empty set (0.07 sec)

      --
      What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
    2. Re:No no no - Dating with SQL by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, that's the easy part... the difficult part is getting someone to grant you INSERT privileges!