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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. :/
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
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.
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
Personally, I rather like reading books on my Palm Pilot. It's much smaller, I can hold 5-10 books at a time, and I never lose my place.
I'd like a book on how to forecast the needs of the technology sector about a year in advance. ; )
Mr. Ska
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....
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 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.
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!
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.
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 can just imagine what a doubly linked list would look like. I'm afraid. Very, very afraid.
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
although slightly off-topic, i would love a book that i could lie flat on my desk...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
- 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.
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?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/
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
~
Support the AC initiative. Copy this message when posting insightfully or wittily as AC.
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.
Best Slashdot Co
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
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.
Best Slashdot Co
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)
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 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.
That's easy to fix. Here's assuming you're using ksh:
$ q
ksh: q: not found
$ alias q=echo 'ksh: q: found'
$ q
ksh: q: found
$
Seriously, though, I have the same problem on Linux...
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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.
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
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
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
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.
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
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
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
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 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?
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.)
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Give the option of buying the dead tree book or ebook. Always put the ebook in the dead tree book too.
I really like this idea myself. I am a huge fan of paper books, and try to avoid electronic books. However, the Complete Oracle 8 Reference was just too bulky to carry between work and home. I liked leaving the CD with PDFs at home so if something came up while I was watching TV, I had the complete reference available. However, the majority of the time I was reading the paper verison.
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.
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)
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Go fill in where these HOWTO's left off.
"Programming OCR for Dummies"
It may be narrow, but I've never seen an entry level book to writing an OCR program.
Like I said, I would have killed for a good book like that.
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.
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
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.
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).
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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!
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.
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 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 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
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
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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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
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.
You cant really set E-books up on a shelf to give your co-workers the impression that you're a guru.
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
There are some excellent Ruby titles recently available:
"The Ruby Way" by Hal Fulton
"The Ruby Developer's Guide" by Micheal Neuman
...in addition to the two others already available.
But I suspect that you're right - there will be room for more Ruby titles that cover specfic areas, like dRuby.
Also, how about:
*Ruby for PDAs
*Creating Servlets with Ruby and Webrick
_OR_
*Web services with Ruby and Webrick
I also think the Parrot idea is good - about a year from now it should be starting to have an impact so a book on Parrot released around then should do well.
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?
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));
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.
Damn, where are those moderator points when I need them. Can anyone spare a "+1 insightful"?
As another message hinted - "Sendmail Leashed" would likely be a big hit...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
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.
maybe you get DJ Bernstein to write a book about his software, good software practices in C, programming with security in mind etc
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.
You've got to be kidding! I tried reading Don Quixote on my Palm a while back.. and I don't think I got past the first chapter:
1) Super-low res text KILLS your eyes
2) That single book took up almost all of my palm's memory (8mb)
3) You can only fit about a paragraph per screen.
Give me REAL paper anyday.
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
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*/
I agree wholly. The biggest advantages to a dead-tree book is indexing speed. (At least, for me, I can turn to the index, quickly scan and find the right thing faster than navigating hyperlinks). The other issue is, if you have multiple books open, you can keep them open and still have the thing you are working on right in front of you, whether or not that happens to be what's on the computer monitor.
:)
It's also a lot easier to take a paper book to bed when your significant other rolls over and goes to sleep right away.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
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.
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.
This is a very good point. I won't ever be a game programmer/designer but I have had the itch once or twice to educate myself on the subject and every book I pick up is either overly simple that it is completely worthless even as a stepping stone, just out of reach for my level of comprehension, or so far above my head just opening the text is akin to reading several pages from the Necronomicon on my sanity.
A nice intro book bundled with a simple toolset would be a great thing for dopes like myself to futz around with so I can pretend that I am going to be the next Meier.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
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
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'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
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
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/06/183425 3&mode=thread
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.
Well, working through code translating it from
one language to another is a good way to understand
its underlying structure. I personally am
definitely a better programmer for all the
tedious pascal2c++ translation stuff I've done.
-- Proud descendant of semi-nomadic cattle-herders.
You're dead right on the "easier on your eyes" thing. This was mentioned (I believe) in "Foundation and Chaos", the continuation of Asimov's series by some other authors (can't remember their names).
Paper has one thing beating the hell out of Ebooks: It's passive. It doesn't generate any light - you read the book by seeing different contrasts. That's not saying all Ebook like formats are active. LCDs are active (most... back to this in a moment) and CRTs are obviously active. However, paper is distinctly passive. Now, the thing is, so are Palm-like monochrome LCDs, and there are passive LCDs, but their contrast ratio is just flat out horrible. It's black on... what? Slightly greyish-brown? Horrible. (I will grant you that a Palm, with the Indiglo-like backlight on, is actually really readable - much more so than paper in the dark, at least.)
I have to diagree with you on the "Lots more portable" thing. It's not. Not for me, at least. I read fast - way too fast, I know, but that's how I read. If I go on a week-long trip, or even worse, a month long trip, I barely even bother bringing books along any more. It's not worth it - I finish them too quickly. I usually finish a 400-page book in a day, which means that I'll need to carry seven-eight books. That's why, on my last two month-long trips, I brought along my Palm with several books on my laptop to read. There's no WAY I would've had enough space for 10 books in my luggage with 30 days worth of clothing, supplies, and other things in there. But my Palm, and my laptop, both of which I already needed, take up MUCH less space.
There's a curve there, unfortunately. In small amounts, books are more portable (although a Palm is pretty portable), but electronic media is fixed-size regardless of capacity, whereas books scale roughly linear with capacity. That really starts to hurt when you need a lot of info.
Personally, I'm holding out for electronic ink, which will be passive, high contrast ratio, and massive storage capabilities in a confined space. (It would be trivial to add text highlighting, margin writing capabilities to this, too)
Sounds like heaven to me...
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
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.
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'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
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.
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
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.
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
Or you could just check your mailbox. The spammers are so friendly - telling me how to get dates, add 3" to my penis to impress the dates, etc.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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
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?
You bring up good points, the binding make a big difference in the usibility of books, epecially refernce types. The company I work for produces legal reference books, and uses 3 ring binders that are about the size of a normal book. They have the benifits of a durable cover, they lay flat nicely on a desk, shelf nicely and have a readable spine.
Also they are extensible...
Many of our books come as a subscription that includes monthly updates. Would'nt that be cool for technical books as well? What's that your linux book doesn't cover a feature in the latest kernel? order (or download & print) the new chapter jsut written about it.
We also put out corrections this way, or you can add your own pages, or even blank pages for notes.
i have walked down train tracks, walked down train tracks, drunk at 3 a.m. it not magic, it's no great trick, w
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
- 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.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')))
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.
"Learning to live on half your salary while working twice as hard"
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 ][.
And as an earlier post mentioned, an OSX for Unix/Linux users would be great! Include things like "How do I do task Y now that /etc/Z isn't there?" and how unix/linux configs map into NetInfo.
And the big ones I'm really, really waiting for are some more Mac OS X programming books. A few have trickled out, but we need more.
For example, Learning Cocoa was interesting, but I'm really looking for using Java instead of Objective-C. The only reference I've found is Wrox's Early Adopter's book, and there's no way I'm going to chip out $35 for a book less than 1/2" thick (and it's the same price as many of their 2" thick books!), especially when only half of it is coding, and it's pretty likely to be obsolete very quickly.
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)
You mean this?