So aside from K&R, what are some of the best small books?
I thought that Armstrong's _Programming Erlang_ was the best intro-to-a-language book I'd read since K-and-R.
Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
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Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#52I 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.
Bigger books sell better. Is this true? I was always under the impression that bigness was used to justify a higher price point.
regardless of whether it's true, greenspun reported that it's what the publishers believe:
"It is an article of faith in the computer publishing that bigger books sell better. They take up more space on the shelf and readers with a tech problem find a bigger book comforting. Readers aren't really sure what is wrong with their computer and they only have a few minutes in the bookstore so they figure the thickest book is the most likely to contain the solution."
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#53I 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.
The common element here is Brian Kernighan. _The Awk Programming Language_ is excellent, too.
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#54Part 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.
I agree, although I still like having a hard copy reference. The biggest problem is that books are harder to keep current.
Yeah. You can't write "THIS PAGE IS ALL LIES" on a webpage, but it's easy and helpful in a book.
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#55I've been begging publishers to let me have a go at a ~100 page F# tutorial book, but they've told me again and again that books without a wide enough profile on the shelf just won't sell. It's sad really. I hope ePublishing fixes this.
It's not worth the trouble to go through a publisher anymore. You're not going to make any money on a tech book no matter how popular it is. The smart move in the modern age is to work on the book in the open with a blog and then self publish an ebook. If you like you can even sell it or ask for donations.
I'm starting to think that the ransom model is the wave of the future for self-publishing. If it can work for small-time written works publicized online like role-playing games, what about other kinds of books: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system
Think of it- if publishers won't agree, bypass them and drum up support by getting enough pledgers to prove them wrong. Then self-publish and have the last laugh.
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#56So aside from K&R, what are some of the best small books?
Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets by van der Linden (everybody just has to buy this book, even if you're not doing any programming. The jokes and the anecdotes are alone worth it. I liked most books from Addison Wesley's C++ In Depth Series edited by Stroustrup, they are all thin (around ~300 pages), esp. Exceptional C++ .
Just Java by the same Peter van der Linden was also quite good humor-wise, although I haven't read it in years (it was released around the same time as the first JDK). It's significantly thicker, though, since it covers a broader range of topics like networking and GUIs.
The best of the humor is contained in sidebars dubbed "light relief"; I seem to remember a passage indicating the author was not invited to write a specification because the other authors "didn't want any light relief in it" or something to that effect.
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#57I'd been meaning to pick up a new language, and a few weeks ago I pared down my list of choices to two languages: Scala and Go. Then I went looking for "official" tutorials/references. For Scala I found Scala by Example , a 145 page PDF that comes with the Scala docs. For Go, I found the Go tutorial -- a very short tutorial with a bunch of examples. I picked Go because, seriously, I don't have time to read 145 pages…
The first chapter of K&R is a tutorial introduction, it explains the entire workings of the C language for someone familiar to programming in a small number of pages(It misses pointers, but it covers a lot). Every book on a language needs this. The best I have seen was in a python book where the author stopped and told the reader enough had been learnt to write any program. The closet to the K&R model I have seen is…
The best I have seen was in a python book where the author stopped and told the reader enough had been learnt to write any program.
You must be referring to Think Python: http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#58I've been begging publishers to let me have a go at a ~100 page F# tutorial book, but they've told me again and again that books without a wide enough profile on the shelf just won't sell. It's sad really. I hope ePublishing fixes this.
Write the book. Show it to HN. People will buy it!
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#59I've been begging publishers to let me have a go at a ~100 page F# tutorial book, but they've told me again and again that books without a wide enough profile on the shelf just won't sell. It's sad really. I hope ePublishing fixes this.
Start a project on Kickstarter and post on HN. http://www.kickstarter.com/
Re: Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.
#60I'd been meaning to pick up a new language, and a few weeks ago I pared down my list of choices to two languages: Scala and Go. Then I went looking for "official" tutorials/references. For Scala I found Scala by Example , a 145 page PDF that comes with the Scala docs. For Go, I found the Go tutorial -- a very short tutorial with a bunch of examples. I picked Go because, seriously, I don't have time to read 145 pages…
Had the same issue, same two languages.
Google Go still feels far from prime time, so I settled on Scala.
Got David Pollak's "Beginning Scala" book, Googled a lot and after several days of coding it clicked. Well worth the effort! The Web frameworks are not yet there (Lift is complex, Play is slow), but I learnt a lot.
I still keep my eye on Go, code most of the time C++/C++0x, some projects in Scala, and hope one day I can have all the benefits in one place.