PG's Hackers & Painters is O'Reilly's $10 ebook deal today | Hacker News Reader

PG's Hackers & Painters is O'Reilly's $10 ebook deal today

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65 pointsdreyfiz23 comments

It's also on Scribd for free. You can download the PDF as well.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/47180/Paul-Graham-Hackers-And-Pain...

Gotta wander off on a tangent here — scribd is a beautiful site! I'm probably the last one around here to find out since this is the first time I've looked at their site since they dropped Flash (which I ignored) but wow, what a difference — if you found scribd not to your taste and haven't been back since, it's time to revisit it.

Yes, scribd is great now. I used to hate it. I recently Googled the Blueprint CSS cheat sheet and...not bad, Scribd! No Flash!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/12850249/Blueprint-CSS-framework-v...

It's only $12.23 on amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp...

for the dead tree version.

I'll always be fond of this book because, directly or indirectly, it changed my life.

A funny if not totally consistent counterpoint:

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

I always found this counterpoint article fatuous.

To which I'd add, what hackers and painters don't have in common is everything else. The fatuousness of the parallel becomes obvious if you think for five seconds about what computer programmers and painters actually do.

Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data.

Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.

How many programmers sit down and say "It's time to do some electronic data transformations"? How many painters say "Time to push some paint"?

PG is right that programming is a fundamentally creative activity, and so are the visual arts. Plenty of programmers forget that. It's not that the medium is irrelevant, but then again PG isn't claiming complete identity between programming and painting.

(Personally, I prefer the analogy of programming to either writing or music composition, because the writing connection is quite strong. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/dahl-programming-minimali... if you're interested.)

Is your criticism really "fatuous? no YOU'RE fatuous!"? That comes across as a little, well, petulant. The point is not about what programmers or painters or line cooks say when they get down to work - it's whether any insight-bearing parallels can be drawn between them. The important thing being insight-bearing, rather than insecurity-assuaging.

At a minimum, it is no less 'consistent' than the original which has the glaring disadvantage of not being funny at all.

Direct link to the book, skipping the tweet http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449389550/

Or at Amazon.com for $12.23 http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp...

FYI the kindle edition is always $9.99 and available at the Amazon link above.

yeah, that's what I was thinking too. I already have a Kindle, and it makes more sense for me to do long form reading on my Kindle.

I posted the tweet because it contains the discount code.

I got the real dead-tree edition of Hacker & Painters that someone left in the book exchange rack at the Green Tortiose Hostel in SF. Just another reason I love that place.

Good book. Recommend taking advantage of this deal if you haven't yet read it, its a easy read that will get the gears turning.

Is there new content compared to whats available for free online anyway?

A lot of similar material appears in both the book and in his essays posted online, but there's also some unpublished stuff in the book as well.

As to the ratio, I couldn't say. But as with Hacker Monthly, I find reading a print edition to be a new experience anyway, even if I've read the online text beforehand.

It should be free. Spain did win the WC after all. Just sayin'

All of the essays from the book are available at http://paulgraham.com/essays.html, though with some differences. (Some have different titles as well.) It's a great opportunity to use Readability,

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail164.html

and

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail657.html

also.

WTF? Why are we retweeting on HN?

Because I didn't catch the original tweet. Thanks to this a couple other people who would benefit from the book will read it.

And Tim and Paul will make some money out of it.

Yeah, and I think this is a perfect example of a valid retweet for HN. Most aren't, but this is from the source and includes the discount code.

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