Humble Book Bundle: The Joy of Coding
humblebundle.com
humblebundle.com
LYAH and LYSE are both VERY good. Like, really, really good. They are free, but if they weren't, they'd make this bundle worth it on their own.
Likewise, The Land of Lisp and The Realm of Racket are great if you want to think like a Lisper/Schemer. TLOL, however, is a better book, covering (I think) more stuff. TROR also suffers a library dependance, but I don't especially LIKE Racket, so take this with a grain of salt.
If Hemmingway Wrote Javascript is an excellent exploration. You'll see a variety of code, some good, some bad, some smart, some dumb, and all of it mind-expanding and entertaining. It demonstrates Javascript's remarkable flexability, and argues that there is no one way to write good JS: you should use the right tool for the job. It doesn't substantiate this well, but it's fun all the same.
I've heard good things about EQJS, and Write Good Code looks interesting, but I haven't read any of them, so I cannot pass judgement.
But honestly, most of NoStarch's stuff is pretty good. Not as consistently good as O'Reilley, but their best stuff is better than O'Reilley, although not as good as MITPress.
Seriously, if you're ever in Camebridge, visit the MITPress bookstore. It's full of good books, Has excellent staff, and sells off slightly damaged books at discounts that aren't even funny. And even without the discount, it's much cheaper than buying their stuff online.
/shameless-plug
...wait a minute. Lisp was for the large part developed at MIT. The Boston transit system is the T. In lisp, the symbol for truth is T. Coincedence? Probably.
The book is also a pedagogical feat.
Anyways, yeah, I'd never heard of HFFP before now, and don't have the spare cash to check it out. It seems neat, though.
Would "The Land of Lisp" help me get past the C language mindset and see things from the Lisp point of view?
I'm not planning to be a expert Lisp programmer, but I do wish to get an understanding of what Lisp does and, who knows, maybe learn enough to start looking at Elisp code and contribute to Emacs.
While there's a good explanation of Lisp basics, the actual game examples use some pretty advanced coding techniques. It would definitely help to be familiar with recursion. ('The Little LISPer'/'The Little Schemer' is a perfect introduction to recursion.)
Conrad Barski's style is enjoyably idiosyncratic, but - despite the illustrations and blurb - this is not a book for the beginning programmer!
I prefer digital because I can send out updated copies of the books to readers for free, which I can't do on paper. And programming stuff changes so frequently.
So I guess I'm saying if you want print books, you should make that known by buying physical copies of books. Cos if the trends I see continues, I can't imagine it'll be practical to do print tech books too far into the future.
It's hilarious that people in tech clamor for physical books, even at the cost of trees, environment, poor accessibility, poor maintainability, poor upgradability and poor portability. I suspect it is because of the sucky "format-hell" of ebooks and sub-par reading experience. And the fact that ebooks are still not a first class citizen of the web I agree that these trends will continue. And that's exactly what publishers would want. To be able to make more money!
Personally I find the tactile experience of reading a hard-copy helps me focus and generally enjoy the physical experience of interacting with a book. And who ever said that people in tech were concerned about the environment?[3]
[0]http://er.educause.edu/articles/2015/9/paper-or-tablet-readi...
[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3873942/
[2]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251509359_Comparing...
Full disclosure: I'm the developer.
I don't understand, why do you find it "hilarious" then? You're answering your own question! I'd call those major issues with ebooks.
For the record, I own LYAH from NoStarch (I actually bought the PDF+printed copy a few years ago, but sadly the printed copy was lost in transit and never arrived, and I didn't do anything about it), and I've never used the ebook version. I tried, but it was horribly uncomfortable. It's funny, but the website is actually the preferred format, and way better than the ebook.
I agree but I'd correct that to 'web is the preferred medium' instead of 'website is a preferred format'.
Websites aren't a book reading experience. I mean they can hold the content of a book but even as we gain on accessibility with a website the reading direction, proper pagination and memorize-ability is lost.
It doesn't feel like a book anymore.
> even at the cost of trees, environment,
We grow trees to make paper. That's how the paper industry works. Nobody complains about us devastating "virgin potato fields" because we use potatoes to make chips. But the logic is precisely the same. There are more trees _today_ than in the 1950s because of the paper industry (as well as tree planting efforts). So if we stopped using paper cold-turkey, we would remove the financial incentive for companies to plant more trees.
> I suspect it is because of the sucky "format-hell" of ebooks and sub-par reading experience.
For me the real issue is the licensing. I think that it is intolerable that a company can claim that you don't own ebooks. It's a slap in the face to traditional freedoms of readers and is incredibly chilling. Amazon deleting copies of 1984 and other books from every kindle on the planet paints a precedent that should be taken very seriously. Not to mention that their product line is literally named after fire-related terms (perhaps subconsciously implying the purpose of the products is virtual book burning)! You couldn't make this stuff up.
Companies that sell PDFs which are licensed under free licenses are much better, but the other issues you mentioned still mean I probably won't buy ebooks for a while. I prefer physical pages.
Sure. Wanting to own physical books to avoid issues of broken licensing model or issues of service centralization isn't the same thing as wanting physical books because dead-tree ones supposedly feel better than their electronic counterparts.
The latter is simply untrue, only a means to hijack industry standards, sell propaganda, and profit from it.
IMHO, electronic books can easily have a great reading experience (much, much better) if only books/manuscripts related software was let in the open for people to innovate upon. Or made a part of the web, a first class citizen, with decentralization, accessibility etc.
I pretty much agree with you that existing options have a lot of deliberate problems but do not think that the solution to all of those is in physical books. I'd rather push for books and web being coalesced into a single unified resource that is both accessible and open.
My friend & I even started a community/foundation that we plan to build on some of these ideas:
> Amazon deleting copies of 1984 and other books from every kindle on the planet paints a precedent that should be taken very seriously.
I hadn't heard about this before! And what's even worse is that Amazon was allowed to acquire the .book TLD and with that own a very very large piece of "public property" for peanuts. I guess there was very little reportage by media on this. But then such is life lately.
> There are more trees _today_ than in the 1950s because of the paper industry…
That's an interesting thread to go after. My tryst with physical books was almost a decade ago, and the industry I knew locally then was quite different from what you describe here. If the world gives up on ebooks like the talk of the town is lately, I'm pretty sure there will be an "impact" that would no longer hide under the design of industry.
I'll be honest, I prefer physical books. The smell, the feel of turning real pages, the fact that I can write all over them, the fact you don't need to charge them. These are things that you can't emulate with an ebook. Are they subjective? Yes. Are there things that are easier with ebooks? Hell yes.
However, I feel that I learn things better when I read from a book than when I read from a screen. I'm not sure why (and I've heard there's been studies on this) but maybe it's got to do with how I grew up learning -- lots of book reading in weird positions on my couch (I like lying upside down with my head on the floor if I'm really into a book).
If we had better large format readers, that might change somewhat (at least, the subjective UX preference bits); I'm happy enough with ebooks for the most part, but then my freakishly large tablet (Galaxy Note 12.2) is about the minimum tolerable size reader, for me, for many tech books.
Yes, that is correct. It is true that retention is better with a "rigidly & finely laid out" book. Physical books have a rigid layout so they have that advantage. Some ebook formats too have that quality and those ebooks have a better retention.
Retention/memorization depends on visual signatures of a piece. I mean, apart from the context it is the arrangement of paragraphs, subtle use of diagrams and figures and a well designed layout, and other hints that add up into the pictographic memory that people form while reading books. Also the linear reading direction and sometimes even the page number helps people recall a concept later in life.
While I do understand that the nature of screen has an "impact" on the book reading experience (or any software experience), and thus on its device sales, but I'm not sure how the screentype would affect someone's memorizability of an ebooks independent of the layout in use: flexible or rigid. That sounds a bit far fetched.
Kindly quote the source of that claim/original research.
Agree with your sentiment but I don't think economics will be the cause of fewer books being printed. The technology for printing has advanced to the point that Amazon and other Print-on-Demand companies are able to fulfill their standard delivery promises for online orders without even carrying inventory.
The future will most likely be fewer books printed because publishers will just stop doing it and offer print-on-demand, passing the price to the customer.
My tmux book was originally done like that - printed only on demand. And the price difference reflected it.
I made the mistake of buying a few technical ebooks, but never will again.
My only concern is that publishers seem to be shifting to cheaper and cheaper bindings and glue, which may negatively impact the lifespan of my books.
In general I won't buy a book unless it's available as an ebook. Over time I've found all of the features of paper books that I like are just no comparison to the convenience and usefulness of ebooks.
That said, I do occasionally buy used paper books, or an old book that doesn't have an ebook.
Not (normally) legally though. I'd be glad if they would include a notice at the beginning allowing me to do that.
I've bought a handful of e-books, mostly just to help support people I know who wrote the books, as usually they were on topics I wasn't really interested in.
For my own "use", I've bought one e-book that I can recall and I only bought that one because I had recently bought the (very thick) dead tree version, it was offered at a significant discount, and I was about to leave on a trip and was wanting to take the book. For a few bucks, I was able to buy the e-version, load it onto my iPad (that was going along anyways), and have one less to have to worry about packing (there's not a lot of "luxury" space available on a Harley-Davidson).
Also, I think the choice languages is really good. F#, Clojure, R, Lisp, Haskell, Racket, Erlang... it's great to see all these paradigms represented. I can't speak for books themselves, but I think it's awesome that this book pack will reach the Humble bundles audience.
I like the charity bit however, so I am going to donate the money directly to this bundles charity organization (which happens to be EFF hence -> https://supporters.eff.org/donate/button )
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Myself, I've already read Clojure for the Brave and True and also the Eloquent JavaScript so I can recommend the bundle just because of those two. Currently reading Land of Lisp which is good as well but haven't finished so hard to comment on.
But, for the price of $15, it would be hard not to buy this.
I think a lot of folks who want to really know what they are doing that weren't fortunate enough to grow their skills in a time that forced you to understand the machine through to high level could could benefit from those two books immensely.
Also, how painful will these be to read on a Kindle Paperwhite? I've tried other coding books on there and the code block styling was impossible to make out.
Note that LYAH is also free online. I don't know about the Python book, as I don't do Python very much.
Thanks
People can feel like they get a lot of value for little money, without the sellers explicitly losing.