Comment by ozataman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ozataman | Hacker News Reader

I applaud the author for his tenacity. There is no doubt that kind of discipline produces results, both in terms of work product and personal advancement.

However, I have serious doubts about the merits of writing a book about a subject intricacies and philosophy of which you have not yet had the chance to distill through the lens of experience.

The method may, perhaps, work for simple recipes, how tos and other procedural knowledge. I really don't think it would work for anything in or above the intermediate range of content on any meaningful, commonly deep topic.

Just imagine whether the "Mythical Man Month", "Code Complete" or "Innovator's Dilemma" could have been written with this kind of approach.

I don't know about others but when I read a book, I sometimes realize the presence of an unavoidable slight bias towards believing the author and respecting his conclusions, that is unless I am already deeply knowledgeable about the subject and have my own strong opinions. It better be the case that the author is in fact trustworthy on the subject.

Generally I agree, but the topics of his books (SPDY, Dart, and backbone ) are all extremely new technologies. Like they have all been released only in the past year. Very few people have a ton of real world experience with these.

So I think the book reader probably will know that the author doesn't have years of battle tested experience but understand that the book is meant to be a good way for a beginner to get up to speed and get going with the topic.

They might be "extremely new technologies", but how do they fit into existing picture?

This is akin to a layman writing a book on International Klein Blue, but having no idea of what other colors are out there. It's a form of a "blind leading the blind" situation.

I think we're actually mostly in agreement :)

Neither The SPDY Book nor Dart for Hipsters was meant to be a definitive guide on their respective subjects. They are 150 page intros and, as you say, probably well suited for this approach.

For Recipes with Backbone, we aimed for the intermediate / advanced audience. Again, I agree that I probably could not have gotten there in 3 months on my own. For that, I relied heavily on my co-author (Nick Gauthier), who is battle tested with Backbone.js. So, again, I think we are in agreement.

That said, even the intro books are living books. I plan on refreshing and adding as the technology evolves and I as become battle tested (I'm working on edition 1.1 of The SPDY Book now). So over time, I hope to get closer to the ideal tome on the subjects.

Maybe slightly OT, i would like to know your motivations for diving into multiple distinct subjects ?

Do you, kind of like Sal Khan (of Khan Academy fame) feel curious to know more & more stuff, & then want to share your knowledge & understanding with the rest of the world, by writing books ?

Context : my comment above http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3904024

Yup, that is absolutely why I do this. I'm not sure it would be possible to keep this up without an intense curiosity about these topics :)

There is also a selfish aspect to it. By writing the best book that I am capable of, I learn this stuff much better than I would by playing around with it for a day or two.

Motivations and results feed each other and (hopefully) produce great results.

It depends very much on the topic. Something that can be approached with analytical rigor or determined completely through a few tests can probably be written by diving in and learning everything while you write. Personally, I write technical articles mostly to cement things I just found out in my own mind and I have often found that in my testing and writing I learn things creating my articles that I hadn't known.

But more ephemeral topics benefit greatly from experience. When I was in the military, I benefitted greatly from the experience of my NCOs and much of what they passed on to me where things that would have been very hard to put into a book or discover through any process other than experience.

But I suspect most technical topics fall into the former category rather than the later.

Good argument.

But then by the same argument, would you not trust Sal Khan's Khan Academy videos, since he himself has experience in only a few of the many areas, he researches & then makes educational videos about.

I would tend to agree with you : as a rule, people need to be experienced in a discipline/area to produce high quality content in that discipline/area. People like Sal Khan are the few & rare exceptions to this rule.

Or maybe this post says more about the merits of writing a book vs. writing software than it does about the author's awesomeness.

As an editor at a publisher, I think book should not write this way, even for cutting edge technology that lack of documents. One can put his articles on web, but a book means responsibility. To ensure that a reasonable structure, good reading experience, the contents of profound value, of course, does not misleading the reader.

For the publisher, if know the author do not have professional background, should not publishing their book. Because that means risking a lot.

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