Ask HN: Best book structure
What is the best book structure you have ever read?
sidenote: we are talking about technical books.
sidenote: we are talking about technical books.
- the way Graham, Knuth & Patashnik's Concrete Mathematics has the students' comments, silly or enlightening, in the margins. Its also very well designed and put together.
- I absolutely love the design of Sedgewick & Wayne's Algorithms (4th ed.) The fonts, colour palette, diagrams illustrating algorithms etc, are all miraculously awesome. The next algorithms book I looked at seemed so tedious and incompetent I wanted to complain.
- I love raganwald's JavaScript Allongé apart from the pictures. But there are pictures throughout of coffee, coffee machines, coffee bushes etc with coffee-related captions, all totally unrelated to the text, that somehow work, like a breath of fresh air through the book.
- Needham's Visual Complex Analysis is a marvel of clarity in word and picture.
- Eloquent Javascript (I read the online version[0]) is impressively well-designed. A good mix of covering-the-basics and projects. A clean, simple and beautiful form.
Books that are for teaching a skill to a beginner generally follow a project based approach. You start with a basic concept and have the reader build a project. Then you go on to a more advanced topic and have the reader build a more advanced project. It would be great if each project built upon the previous ones. I think that is one reason why Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial is so popular: https://www.railstutorial.org/book.
Then there are reference books. These are for experienced people to go back and relearn a concept they forgot. These books are great when organized with a clear table of contents for easily looking up topics. They don't need elaborate projects, but they do need examples to demonstrate the application of the concept. Something like the C++ reference would fall into this category: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/.
Hope that helps. Good luck!
The writing and clarity of explanation is the top quality I look for in technical writing though.
Edit... Looking at your past submission I would go with project based layout that focuses on one topic at a time but touches on the other topics as needed. With questions at the end of each chapter and project ideas / part lists for home exploration. Sounds like a fun project, good luck!
- If you only read it linearly it gives you the most crucial points early up front.
- It does an excellent job of linking between and to relevant sections. The most natural way to read the book is to read it non-linearly.
- It balances depth and brevity.
It's really beautiful, and a crazy visual way to learn how to design web pages. And it ramps up slowly and nicely enough for you to fully understand everything.