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Comment by afloatboat | Hacker News Reader

I orignally bought ng-book and it was terrible. Bad explanations and the examples were riddled with errors that made it unusable for beginners (its target group).

It was being distributed via a self-publishing platform that had a comment form where a large number of people were complaining. The author's reaction was to take it down from that site and still distribute it via other platforms as to hide the negative feedback.

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I originally bought ng-book and it was awesome. Detailed explanations with important notices about best and harmful practices. It contains much more information than official documentation and gives better understanding of how AngularJS work under the hood.

ng-book last update was to version 1.4, so all promises of authors have been fulfilled - that's why I trust authors again and why I bought ng-book 2. I'm not affiliated to authors.

upd.: congrats with your first comment on HN.

I have indeed noticed some updates coming out and have looked at the contents of the book after a couple in hopes that the examples would have been updated, but that didn't happen. I was mostly disappointed in the lack of response from Ari Lerner at the time as well.

I was also surprised by the order of the subjects. It almost immediately started of with a manual $compile function and custom binding parameters. Which I felt would be better placed later in the book, when a user is more comfortable with the angular syntax and workings.

Still, I don't want to sound overly negative. If it worked for you it must be doing something right. But sharing this experience actually triggered me to create this account after lurking for so long. :)

$compile is the core of Angular.

I will admit that there have been times this last year that we haven't responded as quickly as we'd like to all our support requests. For ng-book 2 there are four co-authors and we've put processes in place to respond more quickly this time around.

But your concerns around teaching order are totally valid. With ng-book 2 we've taken a code-first approach. We're starting with smaller chunks of concepts and building up the theory from there. Every example comes with complete running code separate from the book. So it will be a lot easier to see how everything fits together. I'd love to get your feedback on what we have so far, if you're up for it. My email is in my profile.

I generally don't like to bash anyone, but I had the same experience. ng-book, at least the edition I bought, was poorly organized and confusing. There were frequent references to concepts not yet explained. Often, it simply listed documentation of all of the available options on an API, rather than build up from the basic principles and then explain the variations. It felt confused as to whether it was a reference book or a guide.

ng-book 1 is a little of both reference and guide. angular 1 is tricky in that there are several "tripods" of knowledge (ie three concepts that all depend on each other before you can understand the others).

That said, I'm sure we can do a better job at explaining many of the concepts. Ng-book 1 has an update in progress as we speak and I'd love to improve the section(s) you're referring to with more of a guide?

Would you be willing to let me know which part(s) you'd like to be clearer (either here or via email)? My email is in my profile and I'd love to chat.

Nate, co-author here.

Sorry you had a bad experience with our book. We've definitely made some improvements to the early chapters in the last few months (the book has been updated over 30 times and it's over 600 pages long).

We did use leanpub in the beginning and we did switch to gumroad. But the switch was because gumroad was a better fit for us, not to hide negative reviews. For instance, you can still read tons of reviews of our book on Amazon.

I'd love to hear more of your ideas on how we can make the early chapters better. Also, I'd like to give you a refund since you're not happy with the book. Email me at us@fullstack.io and I'd love to chat.

Refunds aren't necessary, it was actually my employer who paid for the book so it doesn't matter that much to me. I'm still receiving updates since I bought the book via gumroad and might actually check it out again now that I have more knowledge of the framework.

I'm just glad to see you're listening to feedback and working on actively improving the book. I think books are a very important way to get a linear education on a subject instead of random tutorials. Especially with angular, where so much has changed over the different versions.

It's a shame that Good Developers now less SHARE, but EARN as much as possible from their KNOWLEDGE (which was contributed a long time from community). I guess their startup service is as bad as their book, too. P/S: I don't live in EU or America, but i don't think the civilization there could create that bad people.

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