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Comment by slazaro | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that jokingly thinks the book title might be just a little bit pretentious? Don't get me wrong, I love what this guy does, I follow him on Twitter, and I have no doubts that the book is great.

But the "color" books like the Red Book or the Orange Book have other actual names, and people just gave them the "color" name because they were classic references. It's like this one just presumes that it's as important as the others and has to have a classic name.

Disclaimer: This complaint is obviously not serious.

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I doubt it's really an attempt to emulate the 'color' books of the Hacker Lexicon

It's more likely a reference to the Michael Abrash games programming black book (a big, thick, book of finicky assembly-level hacks for general use in the DOS era), which I'm sure is an inspiration for this work, and this one, as with Sangard's blog, could be seen to be a game-specific spiritual successor.

How pretentious that is, I'll leave you to figure out.

I don't know the red or orange books you mentioned, my first thought was that it was a play on 'little black book', a book of dirty secrets and hidden knowledge.

Probably that and a reference to https://www.amazon.ca/Michael-Abrashs-Graphics-Programming-B...

Don't forget about the OpenGL 'red book' - OpenGL Programming Guide

And the 'red book' of CD audio, the spec originally was in a red binder.

plus the opengl shading language is the orange book

Interestingly, the vulkan book is also red

also: graphics red books are more like anotated standards

Then you need to watch Hackers (again) :).

I've always used the term "black book" when referring to a "compendium of nasty details", though this use might not be en vogue anymore (in English, in German it still is).

In this case, I think the title is well-chosen.

It’s common in English. There’s even a sitcom called Black Books that riffs on that

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