Zed is clearly in the wrong business. He's such a prolific writer, he should really be rewriting and updating the O'reilly catalog.
What you need is someone with decent taste to say this sucks, that's cool, here's why.
I have no idea how those two would ever co-write a book though. I bet that would sell, however.
Half his audience will read this and think, "Gee, I don't want to be an idiot--I should continue reading!". The other half will take it as an insult, or just find it to be in bad taste, and put the book down.
A good writer should be able to get across his message without insults.
O'Reilly was great to work with but they were a bit worried about offending people. When the book released, it worked out great - people loved it.
When I write my docs I want it to teach people how to use it, and not put them to sleep at the same time.
Second, it depends on the audience, but I plan on purpose to alienate 1/3 of my audience when I write technical documents like this. I focus on alienating the 1/3 of the audience who are arrogant, obnoxious, and too blind to see that their beliefs and values are killing the industry.
I just don't want to work with them, especially if they can't take a joke. Surprisingly, this turns out to be a very small number of people in practice, and they're usually just pseudo-intellectual blowhards.
If you go through all my insults, they're aimed at the people who are screwing things up for the regular Joes trying to get things done. And _that_ is the entire purpose of the Mongrel2 project too.
My point is that your style is very personal and confrontational. You usually start discussions by aggressively speaking out against programmers or certain types of programmers, and only after this move on to any specific work that they've done or their ideologies. What you're really trying to criticize is the work.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this, of course. But it probably sets an unnecessary upper bound on your readership.
Actually, quite the contrary. Even the people who hate that I insult them still read it...and then talk about it for days on end like they have no lives.
I also belong to the ranks of people who don't get offended when you insult people. But I wonder what you gain from it. 1. How do you know that the people who do get offended are the same people you don't want to work with? 2. How do you know that ranting actually deters these people from using your products?
My point is similar to jpeterman's, but my focus is on how you know that you are actually setting and upper bound on your readership, and if you are, how do you know that you are benefitting?
I speak for myself, not for the supposed audience you're alienating, but I simply do not like your tone. That doesn't mean i'm insulted or offended, but it simply means I don't like it when people feel the need to vent in such a harsh manner.
Having said that, I do respect you for putting your money where your mouth is.
A valuable area to target: Concurrency Optimization. Another: Low-Level Optimization and Memory Hierarchy. Books on these already exist, but Zed has the attention of a large swathe of the programming populace that could really use more awareness on these topics. That potential energy could be converted to book sales or sales of some sort.
EDIT: Translation - sure let's hang out. Seems worth a try. You can send email to this user name at yahoo dot com.
Either it's working so damn well nobody needs to tell me because they end up writing their next million dollar idea a week later, or it's really not working and people are just not bothering to tell me.
Thanks.
Two of my friends have commented that they really like the snarky humor. I think it's a part of what keeps them chugging through the designed-to-generate-errors-you-must-debug drudgery.
EDIT: Going back over the book, Exercise 0 caused one of my friends some confusion. The other sailed through it just fine. The confused one is a Windows user and hadn't seen the command line since Windows 3.1. The non-confused one has an Ubuntu netbook. Confusion was over what constituted commands to type in and what was the part you should see. The mode switch between the Python prompt and the CMD command line also took a few minutes of explaining.