Mastering Vim Quickly: From WTF to OMG in no time
https://jovicailic.org/mastering-vim-quickly/
109 pages.
Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
71–80 of 106 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#72I enjoyed reading Professor Frisby's Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming, 146 pages. https://github.com/MostlyAdequate/mostly-adequate-guide
Awesome resource! The companion course on egghead is also great and quirky: https://egghead.io/courses/professor-frisby-introduces-compo...
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#73A Philosophy of Software Design. Very well-written. At 190 pages, quite likely finish-able in a weekend. But if you get 70% of the way through it, that is still very valuable. It makes sense as an underlying set of principles that explain why you would use design patterns.
I see only positive reviews for this book here, but I went to look it up on amazon and the first review doesn't look particularly good and I'm looking for anyones reason to refute this: "This book does not consider functional programming, or the fact that terrible software in modern times is often the result of layers of incorrect abstraction that are often induced by the overuse of "object oriented" (OO) programming…
Hrm, I read the book and the code samples were in mainstream languages, naturally, but there wasn’t a specific reference to OO. Algorithms by Sedgewick had more reference to OO but we don’t say that book is overly biased towards OO.
The text isn’t about implementation or paradigm. It’s about things applicable in software design in general. For example, good interfaces are deep, rather than shallow. The examples of narrow interfaces are in Java because they were good examples. If you have to instantiate 5, 6 objects to use an interface, the interface is not deep. But if you had to do the same thing in a CLI interface or a GUI, it’s the same idea. You could apply the same ideas to functional APIs.
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll say if you are not taking breaks, and notes then you are only wasting your time. A book should be savored. Re-read many times.
What about just reading the book once, and returning to it some day later if you want to refresh and maybe work it properly?
That's the same idea I want to convey.
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#75The 22 immutable laws of marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Software is ultimately for humans. Understanding products, marketing and selling help you build better tools for humans and see how products (be it open source, programming languages, retail products, etc) work in the marketplace and not run down paths of "well this is the most popular they must be the best" ... Solid marketing foundations are probably one…
Any other marketing books worth reading? Especially branding?
What about the 22 immutable laws of branding by the same authors?
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#76A Philosophy of Software Design. Very well-written. At 190 pages, quite likely finish-able in a weekend. But if you get 70% of the way through it, that is still very valuable. It makes sense as an underlying set of principles that explain why you would use design patterns.
I see only positive reviews for this book here, but I went to look it up on amazon and the first review doesn't look particularly good and I'm looking for anyones reason to refute this: "This book does not consider functional programming, or the fact that terrible software in modern times is often the result of layers of incorrect abstraction that are often induced by the overuse of "object oriented" (OO) programming…
I would not agree that the bias towards OOP is a problem in the book, since most of the concepts are paradigm-agnostic.
Nevertheless, I feel that the author exposes a rather opinionated (sometimes even dogmatic) and narrow view of software design.
Although I think that the book provides a lot of very valuable insights, I missed a more differentiated view of the concepts presented in the book. For example, in chapter 4 ("Modules should be deep") Ousterhout dismisses the use of small classes and methods. He argues that using many small classes and methods makes the system as a whole more complex because many little pieces have to be managed. I completely agree with that statement. But only under the assumption that software systems are static and never-changing. If we consider software systems as ever-changing, I would argue that using smaller pieces often provides the flexibility necessary for maintaining large systems.
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#77Yes, programming book notes for specific languages for software developers Link: https://books.goalkicker.com
Wow, this is an amazing compilation
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#78"The Elements of Style", by Strunk & White. 92 pages. For example, page 19: "Put statements in positive form." Code is improved if booleans are put in positive form, such as replace: if (!featureIsDisabled()) ... with: if (hasFeature()) ... You might laugh, but I see the first form all the time. Sometimes I go on a refactoring mission to remove as many negations, nots, and bangs from the code as possible.
"Writing with Style, Conversations on the Art of Writing", by John Trimble is another great writing book (The second edition is 161 pages if you don't include the appendices).
The ability to communicate in writing is an important skill even for developers.
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#79"The Elements of Style", by Strunk & White. 92 pages. For example, page 19: "Put statements in positive form." Code is improved if booleans are put in positive form, such as replace: if (!featureIsDisabled()) ... with: if (hasFeature()) ... You might laugh, but I see the first form all the time. Sometimes I go on a refactoring mission to remove as many negations, nots, and bangs from the code as possible.
?? You mean this book-- "The Elements of Style is an American English writing style guide in numerous editions. The original was composed by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920..." [1]
Cool! 1920s book on English writing style inspiring your coding style.
My first reaction to the 'positive form' was to recall a conversation I had once with a retired programmer about flow control diagrams. They relayed how the normal form for these required, for example, the boolean nodes to exit True in one direction and False in another--but all similar nodes had to exit in the same direction.
I wondered if a paper-based design, once translated into code, might not include conditionals such as the example which seem awkward once the paper design is lost and forgotten.
Now I don't know which detail is more interesting--
How design methodology effects the comprehensibility of written code.
How I was inspired to apply natural language writing principles as programming best practices.
Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?
#80Grokking Simplicity: Taming complex software with functional thinking I’m cheating a bit because this is only under 200 pages because it’s a work in progress. It’s such an easy read, but does a great job at explaining the value of functional programming for building real-world applications without getting bogged down in monads, currying, and complex type systems. Once it’s complete, I’d make it required reading for a…
Judging by the table of contents, this book looks really good. Ideally though I would like to read through a good sized sample on my kindle in mobi format before making a purchase.
The Manning website allows you to read a good amount online for free. Their books and book reading experience are impressive.