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Comment by lispylol | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone feel like a book by a non-zen expert that attempts to teach something as deep and ancient as zen through programming analogies actually does more harm than good? It teaches neither programming nor zen, and may contain a number of cherry-picked principles that are devoid of the context necessary for understanding.

I think it would be awesome of someone wrote book about very specific processes that they were able to come up with as a result of practicing some philosophy, and leave the actual teaching of the philosophy to an expert.

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This book is containing my own story with Zen. How did it change me personally and how does my daily work life looks like. What have I understood from it. And so on. Actually the book contains the result of my practice. Inside the book you'll find many references to the actual original texts where you can read more about it.

You wrote "may contain" and "it does not". You simply don't know whats inside the book if you haven't read it.

Instead of assuming what the book is about or not, I invite you to just read it. If you are not happy with it I will refund you. Or if you buy it on Leanpub they will refund you according to their 100% happiness guarantee (on Leanpub you have even a bit more time to read the book).

Here is the book on Leanpub: https://leanpub.com/thezenprogrammer

Here is the happiness guarantee: https://leanpub.com/thezenprogrammer#happiness_guarantee

There is no risk for you. When you have read it I am happy about your email if you liked it or not and if you actually see any harm in it.

My comment wasn't purely speculative. That would be unfair. It contains the thoughts that I had after reading your sample.

Here's one excerpt

Kôdô Sawaki says: if you need to sleep, sleep. Don’t plan your software when you are trying to sleep. Just sleep. If you code, code. Don’t daydream—code. If you are so tired that you cannot program, sleep. Even known multitaskers like Stephan Uhrenbacher have decided to work singlethreaded

Who's Sawaki? Who's Uhrenbacher? This is what I mean by missing context. Now that I think about it, some of the criticism (mine included) may be due to the fact that you picked the final chapter to represent a sample. You pretty much gave away the ending, and we have no clue how you got there.

Sawaki is a known Zen Master. He didn't write texts on his own; his books are just quotes collected by his students. The internet is full with information on him.

Stephan Uhrenbacher is linked in the original blog post: http://www.grobmeier.de/the-10-rules-of-a-zen-programmer-030...

The "10 rules" post is the beginning, not the end.

The more expert a teacher claims to be, the more they have to learn.

I think any career advice that isn't coming from the people who've hired is good advice.

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