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Is there any way to do this datamining, but not just looking at amazon links? By that I mean that I'm sure people mention "Code Complete" often enough, but don't bother linking to it on Amazon. That'd be interesting to see the results. Also could be interesting to see this study, but also weighted based on the number of votes the posts referring to them got.
Ah, the good old Design Patterns book, responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted, unreadable, hard to maintain Java code than anything else before or since.
>, the good old Design Patterns book, responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted, This is a misunderstanding of the DP book. It would be similar to saying that the existence of TVTropes.com is responsible for terrible scripts of tv shows and movies. Or, the existence of the Oxford English Dictionary is responsible for bad novels and useless documentation. The DP book is a catalog (to gain awareness) and not a che…
> This is a misunderstanding of the DP book.
It is discussing an effect of the book, not the intent.
> It would be similar to saying that the existence of TVTropes.com is responsible for terrible scripts of tv shows and movies.
Which would be entirely accurate if script writers were widely using TVTropes pages as templates and creating bad scripts from it, regardless of what TVTropes is intended to be.
Ah, the good old Design Patterns book, responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted, unreadable, hard to maintain Java code than anything else before or since.
I don't think that's fair. The driving point of that book was that developers needed a higher level language to talk about these patterns than simply at the code level, and showed people how to put together a vocabulary. Yes, it came with a library of sample patterns useful for Java developers, but they weren't egregious examples, nor were they the main point of the book. They were just taken to an extreme by people…
Nice Amazon affiliate hack. Would be great if the OP would tell us how many sales he made through this post (once he got the stats from the Amazon affiliate dashboard).
I'm not sure I see what's wrong with this. The author obviously invested work in this and provided a resource others may find useful. You're free not to buy books through their affiliate links.
Ah, the good old Design Patterns book, responsible for more atrocious over-abstracted, unreadable, hard to maintain Java code than anything else before or since.
Everybody independently created singletons and factories and builders, we just all called them different things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I see what's wrong with this. The author obviously invested work in this and provided a resource others may find useful. You're free not to buy books through their affiliate links.
What about this is useful? There is no breakdown of whether the mentions were upvoted or downvoted, no mention of whether they solved the problem (or were even relevant to the question), no review of the books so that readers can make an informed decision, etc. This list is not much different than making a list of the top selling programming books on amazon.
To each their own; shaming the OP on HN for adding affiliate links on their own website, on the product of their own effort, is what I'm trying to point out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I see what's wrong with this. The author obviously invested work in this and provided a resource others may find useful. You're free not to buy books through their affiliate links.
What about this is useful? There is no breakdown of whether the mentions were upvoted or downvoted, no mention of whether they solved the problem (or were even relevant to the question), no review of the books so that readers can make an informed decision, etc. This list is not much different than making a list of the top selling programming books on amazon.
> This list is not much different than making a list of the top selling programming books on amazon.
Something which Amazon does, because likewise 'others may find [it] useful'.
Like here on HN, Art of Computer Programming gets mentioned a lot. But I've not met anyone who has actually read it. And I own a copy. It's so hard of a read that I am just going to assume anyone who says they did is either lying or Donald Knuth.
I'm suspect of books as a means of information conveyance. They make great mediums for narratives, but narrative is too slow for technical writing. Similarly, I dislike videos, podcasts, and conference talks. Technical writing should be a wiki-like document where terms expand in-place. Start super high-level. Always written in clipped, imperative style. Single line per fact. Like mathematical proofs, but maybe in reverse.