On 14 Sep 2013, at 11:58, Paul Robinson <[email protected]> wrote: > Nearly all tech books make perfect sense on Kindle, I think. Being able to > dive into any one of a dozen classic programming texts wherever I am - a > meeting, an away day, on my sofa, on the train, whatever - without having to > carry those dozen 300+ pp. said books everywhere is a major advantage.
I've found myself not needing / wanting to do that any more, for whatever reason. Mind you I try to keep travelling to an absolute minimum. > That said, I have had a design in mind for some 4-5 years - and a plan to > self-publish - books based on the official documentation of Ruby and popular > frameworks like Rails that would only make sense in paper form and would be > of extremely high-quality and of high utility to most programmers in their > daily work. > > Spiral-bound (so it sits flat on a desk next to a keyboard), tab indexed, and > with the content itself being able to in a single instance show the most > important information about a piece of functionality - and how it evolved > over versions/time - I think if done well from a design perspective would be > useful. Programming Ruby is one of the few books I've found invaluable as a desk reference in the past - spiral bound may have been even better. The idea I keep having is to turn all the core and stdlib docs into flashcards so I can memorise the bits of the APIs I keep forgetting. (Flashcards work well for boring factual knowledge that doesn't involve much actual thought, such as GCSE syllabuses.) I don't know if anyone's already done this (doesn't look so), I'm kinda hoping it'd be a fairly simple process to scrape the documentation though. Ash -- http://www.patchspace.co.uk/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashmoran
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