Part of this stems from a pre-internet mentality. "Of course I need a full function reference! Where else would I find it?" Now you just Google it. A thinner book can leave the reference to the search engines, but for some reason this older way has become entrenched.
Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
21–30 of 112 posts
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#22I agree 100%. K&R is the standard all authors should strive for. The length of these books is also our fault. Bigger books sell better. I hope there is a backlash brewing. K&R, Little Schemer, Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, were all great small books.
I might never write another line of C in my life, but the K&R book will always have a place on my shelf due to many of the reasons given by the article's author. _The Unix Programming Environment_ and _The Practice of Programming_ are two other books that serve as inspirations, both as a writer and a programmer.
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#23So aside from K&R, what are some of the best small books?
Manning's books are all quite concise.
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#24So aside from K&R, what are some of the best small books?
O'Reilly Pocket References. They're not tutorials, but they sure are handy (and cheap).
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#25So aside from K&R, what are some of the best small books?
Roberto Ierusalimschy's Programming in Lua[1] comes to mind. (The link is to the freely available first edition. There's a second edition available that covers more recent versions of Lua.) (Whoops - apologies to brianm - he beat me to this, but I didn't notice.)
Maybe also Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell[2]. It's certainly wonderfully concise and dense (you meet a simple Haskell quicksort in the second chapter, as I recall), but I have to admit that I haven't had a chance to finish it.
One more: The AWK Programming Language[3] by Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, and Peter J. Weinberger, but that's almost cheating since one of the authors is K from K&R.
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#26So aside from K&R, what are some of the best small books?
"Introduction to the Theory of Computation" by Michael Sipser. Was the only computing text I enjoyed reading at university. Sipser explains difficult concepts in a concise and easy to understand way.
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#27So aside from K&R, what are some of the best small books?
I really enjoyed O'Reilly's compact "Up and Running with Rails," which I bought because I could never remember the basics after two reads through the default (monster) rails book, "Agile Web Development with Rails." Sadly, O'Reilly appears to have lost interest in this series; the Rails book dates to 2006 and is too far behind now to recommend. Look no farther than the #2 rated Amazon review ("28 of 29 people found t…
Yes, that attitude seems fairly prevalent. I read a lot of Amazon reviews suggesting the same idea, that you should basically be paying by the number of pages. What that fails to acknowledge is that distilling ideas down to just the important parts is hard work. It's possible that a short book doesn't cover the topic very well, but I think it's more likely that the author has worked really hard to express their ideas in the fewest number of pages possible.
Lately I have decided that I won't even buy computer books that are more than ~300 pages, and I would prefer if they were more in the 100 to 200 page range. I'll take a short, concise, highly target book over a thousand page monster any day. And I'm more than willing to pay "full price" for the short book.
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#28Programming Perl is definitely guilty of this.
Is it supposed to be a tutorial book? I always thought that it was trying (and epically succeeding) to be a massive reference.
I know O'Reilly has the llama and alpacas that are intended to be the actual tutorials, though I can't really speak for their quality (I actually did learn Perl via Camel Book + external projects).
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#29His point about JavaScript is great. Based on Amazon reviews, I couldn't find a single concise tutorial book for beginners from any of the major publishers. I finally bit the bullet and bought the paperback version of Eloquent Javascript (http://eloquentjavascript.net/) which is not only updated compared to the site, but looks to be very promising in terms of brevity and emphasizing hands-on portions. If I wanted a reference guide I have my copy of JavaScript: The Good Parts.
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bigger books sell better. Is this true? I was always under the impression that bigness was used to justify a higher price point.
I suspect it's a perception issue... the price difference between a slim programming book and a fat one is minimal. Dropping $50-$60 on a tome feels like a better value if you have to wheel it out with a dolly, instead of slipping it in your pocket.
I have to concur, unfortunately. If a tutorial book adds a huge reference section, I'd feel that it's a better deal for the same price- I may never look at the appendices, but I'll feel that I possibly could, just in case. Publishers ought to fix the pricing in general.