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Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?

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Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?

#91

Post by blub »

floppy-disk wrote: post #89
code_biologist wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When arguing against small classes and methods by default, he's in good company: http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm... Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12120752

There are also numerous people which promote the excessive use of small classes and methods like for example Kent Beck or Robert Martin. As always, there probably is no "right" answer, it really depends on context.

Yes, except Kent Beck and Robert Martin have zero engineering cred and way too much "Agile" cred, for a lack of a better word.

Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?

#93

Post by chemicalnovae »

WalterBright wrote: post #60

"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.

I was first put onto this book by my PhD supervisor while writing up my dissertation. Revolutionised the way I wrote English for the better.

Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?

#96

Post by loco5niner »

BossingAround wrote: post #66
znhll wrote: post #24

There's a whole series of ebooks by Syncfusion that are exactly what you're describing. Matter fact I think they call them the "Succintly" ebooks series because they tend to introduce a technology or topic in a short 100-200 pages. Check em out here: https://www.syncfusion.com/ebooks

At 2.5k a year, I'd rather pay for Pluralsight or something similar. That's an amazingly huge price for an individual-focused training.

I'm seeing free E-books. That $2.5k must refer to their services.

I just downloaded a free book. In the intro it says:

> Free forever. Syncfusion will be working to produce books on several topics. The books will always be free. Any updates we publish will also be free.

Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?

#97

Post by oldsklgdfth »

kristopolous wrote: post #27

The 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…

Very interesting read.

I find law 12. the law of line extension speaks to the current apple product line. There used to be a single phone they made, today there are 4 to choose from.

Re: Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?

#100

Post by satvikpendem »

cutty wrote: post #4

For those of you who claim to start and finish a book in a weekend, are you spending literally the entire weekend doing nothing by reading? Do you take breaks? Do you speed read? Do you take notes? What's your strategy?

Audiobooks at 4x speed while walking or other menial activities.
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