Hacker News Reader

Comment by sarreph | Hacker News Reader

What an amazing initiative — not least because they're providing something consumable for offline.

Does anyone have any knowledge on the quality of this material? I'd love to dive into quite a few of them where I have surface-knowledge...

View on HN

Agreed, this is incredible - especially to have something that can be perused in physical format.

Looking through some of the examples for the languages I know well enough to judge, these seem to be good quality. As a simple case in point, for how to open a file in Python they only show using a context manager. Even though you can easily read files without that, it is the better, safer, perhaps slightly-more-intermediate-level option and also makes a person more familiar with context managers in general. So it is nice to see best practices presented as the defaults.

Thanks! Python is one of the ones I'm going to check out so that example makes me feel confident about using this as a resource :)

From a cursory glance at the BASH one it seems pretty well organized and thorough. It is not overloaded with information, but gives a good overview of what's possible.

Some specific things I noticed in the BASH book: it says this about cp:

> -a … Combines the d, p and r options

But it doesn't show what -r means.

It could benefit from better discussion of using if without brackets with [] and with [[]]-It discusses them, but I wish it gave better insight on when to use them.

All in all, very handy reference material and I will be grabbing a few more to have on hand.

As somebody who contributed quite a bit to Bash Stack Overflow documentation, I have to say that I consider it a total train wreck. Before (or rather, instead of) touching this, I highly recommend reading something like the BashGuide (http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide) for anybody who looks to get started with Bash.

Even later, as a reference, SO Documentation isn't that useful, in my opinion.

From a look at the Haskell one... the pedagogy is non-existent so I think the "for professionals" label is apt. The content is not in a sensible order or anything like that: it is merely compiled as a topic by chapter.

The nice thing is the formatting and links to an online REPL where you can play with the code samples.

I think it will be a handy reference material.

I agree, I sometimes print to PDF stack overflow threads, now we have some PDFS!

Thanks for the link.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com