Ash Moran <mailto:[email protected]> 16/09/2013 09:26 POODA[1] is printed in colour and has syntax-highlighted code examples.
I've not seen that one before. Looks quite interesting.
Apparently Nat Pryce wanted colour code snippets in GOOS[2] but Addison-Wesley wouldn't let him. (Shame really.)
Funny that the other one is by the same publisher and in colour.
Ash[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-Object-Oriented-Design-Ruby/dp/0321721330/ [2] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Guided-Signature/dp/0321503627/stephen horne <mailto:[email protected]> 15/09/2013 12:45Maybe I'm buying the wrong books, but I've yet to read one - PDF, Kindle or print - that has syntax highlighting. The one I just read on Kindle on my computer had colour images, but still full pages of black code. Seems like a low-hanging fruit to me so I find it quite annoying when it makes me go dizzy flicking between the screens.Paul Robinson <mailto:[email protected]> 15/09/2013 11:20Source code heavy stuff I want neither on my Kindle or on paper but on screen. Syntax-highlighted (because all the code I work with is so my brain is better wired to comprehend it), and possibly cut/paste-able so I can play with the examples a little and try different things.Buying the eBook from O'Reilly, pragprog.com or Amazon and then being able to get it on-screen is therefore quite useful. You're not tied to the device - I like the device for being able to carry a large number of volumes for reference though.However, most decent "tech" books I read these days are source-code light and discussion-strong: I stopped needing to read Sams "... in 24 hours" code-tutorial style books a while back, and I don't think anybody reads books like GOOS whilst trying to really concentrate on the source code are they? For that stuff, I don't feel I need the 1.5kgs of dead tree cluttering up the place either.I also think the design of most paper books in this space is very poor as well. If a book does have a lot of source code in it and is expecting you to sit it next to a keyboard, why is it perfect bound? Why isn't it ring-bound? Cost plays a part, but mostly because bookshops (remember those?), refuse to carry ring-bound books as the display space for them is too high.I don't like publishers making design decisions for the product based on sales need rather than the needs of a reader.There's a *lot* of room for innovation and improvement in this space in both paper and digital formats. I'm still surprised nobody has leveraged the iBook format for tech books properly or at length as well, as it happens.However I am absolutely astonished at the regression that O'Reilly, Sams and Wrox have pushed in the tech books: I had hoped the Head First formats might just break them out of the dearth they were in, but no, we still have the same format for the most part we had in the early 1990s for most topics. Just... awful.doug livesey <mailto:[email protected]> 15/09/2013 09:35I adore my kindle (might get a paperwhite for christmas), but I find it not nearly good enough for most code books. Don't get me wrong, I still buy them for it, as it's cheaper and more convenient to carry around, but I find code examples wrapped too much, and the lack of colour is a real disadvantage, too. Technical books that I really need to study & grok, I buy the paper copies, sometimes after confirming that the investment will be worth it on the kindle (although not often -- that would be silly).--You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NWRUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected].To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nwrug-members. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. Ash Moran <mailto:[email protected]> 14/09/2013 17:23 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
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