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Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly

#81

Post by raboukhalil »

SCdF wrote: post #66

Looks cool! If I don't know any C++ (and never plan to) but am learning Rust, do you think there is value here? Or is really focusing on the C++ -> WASM experience?

Thanks! Yes the book focuses on C/C++, but you don't need very much C/C++ knowledge to follow along in the book.

Most of the time, we treat C/C++ libraries as black boxes that we compile to WASM, though in some cases like Pacman, we do have to modify the original code, but you should be able to infer what we're doing from the context and the text.

Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly

#82

Post by raboukhalil »

seanwilson wrote: post #64

Congrats! Any comments on how straightforward you found completing the book? Did you get stuck at any point? What was the most difficult part? Also, do you have a marketing plan? How are potential buyers going to find this? Random SEO tips from a quick look: clean up you heading hierarchy (start with H1, nest H2 - H5 appropriately; right now they're pretty random), add ALT text to all images (the ones with source cod…

Thank you for the tips! I'll be writing an article in coming weeks about my experience writing this book. This is the second book I self-publish, and unlike the first one, I actually tracked how much time I spent on each category of tasks (writing, editing, marketing, head scratching, etc), so the article will also include that. Stay tuned!

Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly

#85

Post by amreact »

This looks really neat! I noticed that it talks about how to call command line programs from my own webassembly program. Does it talk about techniques that could be used for package management, where someone publishes webassembly binaries and people consume them in their own webassembly binary? If so, does that work even when the webassembly "packages" are written in different languages?

Re: Show HN: I wrote a book about WebAssembly

#90

Post by raboukhalil »

jamestimmins wrote: post #43
taytus wrote: post #30

Honest feedback: Pricing is high. Also, to me, this doesn't look like a good way to use Show HN. A link to Amazon wouldn't be different than what you just did.

While shameless self-promotion would be an issue, I think this is exactly in line with what HN (and even Show HN) is for. Although that's really up to Dang et al. It's a topic that is highly relevant to this community and for which there is high demand, given the number of Web Assembly tutorials that make it to the front page. Obviously, it's commercial, but so are many of the projects in Show HN. The ones that aren'…

Thank you jamestimmins, that’s also my understanding of Show HN
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