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Comment by II2II | Hacker News Reader

These books shouldn't be dismissed since they provide people with a foundation for further learning. They also offer a friendly introduction to programming, rather than imposing an intimidating wall that will keep people away. It is also important to note that these books break the learning into 24 one hour modules, or something similar, so they can have reasonable coverage of a programming language.

If these books have a failing, it has little to do with the concept and everything to do with being poorly written.

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Yes, the biggest fault of those books was that the titles were a cheap gimmick. The implication that you could blow through the book in a day and know the language is kind of a lose-lose, because it undersells the difficulty of the lessons to newcomers and sounds patently ridiculous to professionals. Realistically, someone who has no prior programming experience would take more than an hour per lesson, and would probably take a month or two to get through the book, like any other first-time programming tutorial.

My first exposure to programming was Sam's Teach Yourself C++ In 24 Hours from a used bookstore in my early teens. I didn't stick with it for more than a couple chapters but compiling a program that printed "Hello world" was a magical experience.

There was a time in the 90s when you actually could breeze through a book and know the language. Not Perl, obviously ;)

I won’t attest to the quality of your mental software architecture, but you’ll know the language…

It was around the time C++03 came that things no longer fit in a single book and you need a bookshelf of books to know a thing.

The web circa 2001 was easy enough to build entire sites from scratch in a week with no frameworks. The web circa 2021 was a complicated mess of frameworks on frameworks rediscovering server side rendering (the OG method) again.

I’m a fan of the books that take you through a project start to finish and not chunk it up into mini exercises.

Ha, I got that same book from the public library in my early teens.

I never completed it at the time either, though it created a foundation that enabled me to learn action script (Adobe flash) with relative ease and ultimately go on to complete a computer science degree despite pressure from my high school teachers to go into mechanical engineering or similar.

On balance I got to pursue something that genuinely interested me and happened to pay well and I'll always have a fond memory of the Sam's book, as well as the free Ubuntu CDs that got me onto Linux years before we got broadband

Edit: it wasn't teach yourself in 24 hours, it was the 21 days version (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sams-Teach-Yourself-21-Days/dp/0672...)

The essay is not critical of the contents of these books, but rather of their titles. And I agree with that sentiment. The titles are the clickbait of their time.

The point is that there are better books to start with. The title sets unrealistic expectations.

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