91–100 of 112 posts
I'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.
I'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…
I'm now reading K&R, and I'm surprised at the similarities, although I introduced new libraries just as much as new language features.
I 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.
I'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.
I'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…
http://www.korokithakis.net/tutorials/python/
It introduces most features of the language over 10ish pages, but assumes that you're familiar with programming.
It might be better now than since I last looked, but the one language I haven't found a good tutorial for is Haskell. All the ones I've seen either dumb things down way too much with cartoons and such until they're difficult to slog through and pick out the relevant info, or they assume the reader either already has a working knowledge of Haskell syntax or a working knowledge of group theory.
So aside from K&R, what are some of the best small books?
I always loved The Perl Cookbook. It's got some in-depth discussion in there about language features, but most of the time what I want from a language book is a bunch of (complete) examples to help me learn the syntax, and probably to show me what the language's benefit is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too bad authors get paid by publishers by the number of pages This is not true. Authors get paid by the number of books sold, period. For my book we had an approximate target length, but that was a precondition. Past that gate, all we saw was $x/copy.
I've heard it independently from people working at my economics and finance department. Are you sure it applies to all textbooks? I've never ordered or written a book myself, so I could very well be wrong.
The only thing that's important about page count is that there be enough pages that the book's title is visible on shelves and not so many that you need to reinforce those shelves.
This minimum page count, by the way, is why so many business books suck: they have an idea and examples that they could get across in 10-20 pages but have to stretch it to 300 generously-whitespaced repetitive pages in order to have a physical object on shelves to sell. For this reason alone, we should hail Kindle and other ebook platforms that let you make money from 20 pages. If I never again have to read the business equivalent of an ASCII table, I'll be a happy man.
I 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.
It was if those guys had used the language for a few years building a diversity of things with it; kept notes; and then really thought about the future reader. I'd have thought that it was a revolutionary approach, not a historical oddity.