Slashdot Mirror
Errata in Programming Books?
WgT2 asks: "I recently have set my mind to learning to code PHP. Not being a programmer, yet, I went out and got myself a book on the subject from a very trusted, at least in my eyes, publisher (and they still still are). So far so good. However once I got down to trying the code out myself I have found too much errata for someone who has just scratched the surface in learning the ins and outs of programming. I was wondering just how common place Slashdot readers have found errata in the code examples of programming books they have purchased?"
Tough subjects, tight deadlines, and the profit-first additude lead to bad books.
I recently purchased Learning Java from Oreilly. Usually I've had a good experience with Oreilly books, but this one was horrible. Several of the examples in the first chapter of the book didn't work because they had typos!
Few things are more frustrating then debugging a "Hello World" program that doesn't work. I went over every character, bit by bit, and my program matched their text exactly. I couldn't find the damn bug. Was I so stupid that I couldn't see the obvious? No! I viewed the Online Errata, and found that a zillion other people were having similar problems with examples throughout the book! Typos galore!
If there are too many mistakes in the book, then let the publisher note. Return the book, get your money back, send a note to the publishers, and buy an alternative book.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Many (most?) books publish errata on their web pages or on their publisher's site. I've even got a few books that had printed errata folded up and stuck into the cover. I don't mind seeing a reasonable number of errors in a book, especially a very technically dense book, as long as I see that the author and/or publisher makes the errata sheets easily available. After all, we're all only human.
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Someone has to make a Knuth joke. I tried, couldn't come up with anything. Come on people!
Here's his errata.
My favorite is the Random Number error. It took a while, but someone discovered that apparantly one of the portable random number generators behaves poorly during the first 2000 or so of each seed number. So, naturally, Dr. Knuth corrected it almost immediately.
Never have I seen a man so humble that so amply deserved to be arrogant...
The book I wrote had quite a bit of errata with some simple topics, and not much on the hard topics. I simply didn't spend enough time on the first half of the book, and I regret it.
:-(
What really killed my time was adding more content to the book than initially planned. I should have left it all out, but at the time I thought I had the rest of the book nailed down. I should have spent more time reviewing, and getting more feedback from the reviewers.
If any of you write a book, be sure to stick to the initial plan, and do no more. You might even want to cut out some of the content... don't just write to add more pages to the book. That is one thing I hate about Wrox books, imho, and I did a little bit of that myself
Of course, there are always second printings, and second editions to incorporate the fixes, but that doesn't fix the disappointment of finding the errors in your own book the first time around.
More often than not, it is the editors who are at blame rather than the authors. First off, my bride was a technical writer. I'm still not quite sure what that means, but as an English / Math double major without any coding experience, some of the results were quite comical. A while back she was fixing the Engrish descriptions, code fragments, sql scripts, and a mix of other stuff. She went back to the developer because they possibly misspelled pseudo as sudo. She had the sense to not 'spell check' the scripts, but another friend who wrote a Perl book said his editors were not quite as thoughtful.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
yeah...learn perl so when there is a REAL explosion at the punctuation factory, you'll know what to do.
You'll have that sometimes...
I haven't done any programming in over a decade. I recently had to start learning a lot of new information and bought several stacks of books. I found the O'Reilly books to be VERY helpful. In the past I always found Sam's to be informative and helpful as well, but I found Sam's MySQL in 24 Hours to be rather frustrating because of little errors here and there.
Above and beyond the errors, I don't know if it's because the book is a "in 21 Days" format or not, but I've found it rather frustrating and useless in the long run because it does not work well as a reference book and it seems there is A LOT that has been left out.
I will not likely buy another book in any "in 21 Days" or "in 24 Hours" or any similar format again. While they may provide a quick intro, it seems to be a week format if you plan to continue in the subject.
He's complaining about too much errata? Knuth's $2.56 checks were my goddamn college beer budget!
I don't know which book you got, but O'Reilly's Programming PHP has its own confirmed and unconfirmed errata pages. If this is the book you've got, feel free to go over the corrections noted on these pages and jot them down in your copy -- I've done that with a couple of my books, and would have missed many of the glitches without that hint. If you see an error that isn't on this page, O'Reilly offers a error submission form that you can use for that book (and others of course) -- so use it! If the publisher doesn't find out about these mistakes, they aren't going to get fixed. A good publisher will offer revised printings -- not that that helps you once you've got a copy, but it will prevent other learners from having to hit the same obstacles you did. :-)
You can't, unfortunately, expect books to be perfect & pristine. (Well, maybe Knuth's books, but everyone else has to deal with typos & thinkos :-). You can, however, and should expect the publisher to own up to their little mistakes and offer you corrections on their site. Go find that info and get the fixes into your copy and you'll be a happier camper.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Believe me, I've spent my fair share of time and frustration trying to debug bad examples. It took a long time to learn, but when I don't trust the author, I find that the errors are more challenging than frustrating.
A couple of O'reilly books in particular, Steve Oualline's Practical C Programming and his Practical C++ Programming purposely have errors in the examples for just this reason.
The difference is, Steve tells you that the errors are there. It's a good learning technique, and forces you to pay attention to the concepts rather than the examples.
Notes From Under *nix: blas.phemo.us
Personally I have come across few typing errors in books (then again I RARELY try any of the code they offer in books). I personally have several PHP books and if you are just starting to learn PHP please be aware that the language goes through like 4 updates a month or something like that. I remember when I first tried to learn PHP I attempted some of the code and it would not work. This was because from the time the book was published to the time I got it the PHP language had changed. Some of the defaults were changed etc... so things did not work the way i intended them to (changing it so all variables were not global by default drove me nuts until I firgured out what was wrong).
Basically the point I am trying to make is that with PHP some times the problem may not be with errors in the code, but may be with the fact that the language has changed and no longer supports what you are trying to do... Having saying this if you cannot get a "Hello World" Program to work then I would be a bit suspicious as to whats wrong.