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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?"
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.
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 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....
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source code, I'd rather save $5 and not get a CD instead of getting a CD with demo software that is already 6 monthes out-of-date by the time the book is published.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.
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'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.
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
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
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
Hear! Hear! Paper is:
Electronic formats are okay when you need to provide documentation to a whole bunch of people but most people I know still like having a paper copy and cite the reasons above as why.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
How about some more FreeBSD books. I still can't quite believe we have so few.
:)
Also, MORE LDAP BOOKS PLEASE.
More CISSP options would be great too.
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.