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Comment by st1x7 | Hacker News Reader

The main difference is that "Hands-On ML..." is a legitimately good book.

I think that it's unfair of you just to assert this without giving some specific criticism of this book.

I am pretty interested actually as I am currently trying to write a similar book of my own! I can see a lot of difference between this and what I am trying to do, and may differences to "Hands on" but what in particular are you disappointed with here?

The book in the original post and the other book from the same author are short surface-level summaries of the field that don't go in depth at all and don't provide any meaningful new content. It's like someone took their personal notes, formatted them in a pdf and called them a book. It's an embarrasingly transparent cash grab or just something that helps the author's social media presence because they can now say that they "have written an ML book".

>the other book from the same author are short surface-level summaries of the field that don't go in depth at all

Isn't this the entire point of the 100 page Machine Learning Book? An introduction for new practitioners?

> It's like someone took their personal notes, formatted them in a pdf and called them a book.

Why is that such a bad thing? I like condensed, reader's digests versions of things. Not every text has to break new ground; some of it can be, well, purely educational.

Or do you dispute the educational value of the text?

Legitimately curious; I haven't read any of the books, but I actually like the way you described the author's text process.

I agree - "new material" is actually a concern in the context of a text book. I feel that synthesizing and presenting a coherent view of the communities best practice is a very valuable thing.

I think (but am very open to correction) that this is now a very hard thing for academics to do - the incentive for writing a text book is very low because they are not esteemed or counted as research? Writing a book like this is very hard.

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