If you look at other branches of knowledge, say electronics, there is couple of books for beginners and then massive selection of highly specialized books for experts.
I get that part of this is due to multitude of languages, paradigms, frameworks, etc. but I suspect that a huge part is due to the fact that programming book writers have huge incentive to make the book palatable to absolute beginners and anything else seems to be a sure way for the project to tank.
It's a book about Javascript that assumes you've written software in other languages before. I believe the book uses Java/C#, Python, and maybe a couple other languages as reference points.
It describes language behavior and constructs that may be new to you, and details where the familiar may differ from what you'd expect. For instance, the section on `var` and how function scoping (and hoisting) differ from block scoping was quite detailed, but I don't remember it spending a lot of time on what it meant to declare a variable or why scoping rules matter.
If the book had a beginner focus I might have seen the section on declaring variables, skimmed to see the `var` keyword, and skipped the rest. Then I'd have written a bunch of code that would bite me later, because why would you ever assume function scoping when coming from another language?
It's unfortunate that it's so difficult to find books with either an intermediate to advanced focus, or a focus on switching languages, as I think both are sorely needed in the current programming ecosystem.
[0]: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Professional+JavaScript+for+Web+...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Professional-JavaScript-Developers-Ma...
That's pretty good customer service, but it's not something you can get with a book. I suspect "intermediate" books with a "beginner" start are attempting to address this problem and head off the terrible reviews. Perhaps it's an ego thing with software engineers. "I'm no idiot, so I'm intermediate," "I've been doing software for decades so I'm advanced," and not realizing that it's about your experience with this technology, not your brain.
The style we use to teach is optimized for speed of learning and teaches this way using the 'constructivist' method. I expand on this learning style, and why it is so effective more in this post: https://fromtoschool.com/why-most-programming-tutorials-are-....
The problem is that this is still a crazy fast growing field. Say we double in number every 5 to 10 years. That means at 5 years experience you are more experienced than half the industry.
That’s mindboggling.
Newbies also need more help and are more willing to pay for help.
Oldbies only pay for help when entering a new area. Like a fortran engineer picking up React or a JS person getting into C++
One problem is that software engineering doesn’t quite value experience yet. Easier to throw 3 newbies at a problem than 1 senior who’s never seen this new tech anyway.
The other issue is that engineers are smart and motivated by problem solving. They’d rather figure it out themselves than take all the fun out by just learning it like a normal person and reaping the rewards.
Also advanced stuff often gets so in the weeds that only you and 50 of your friends in the whole world even care. Or it’s so specific to your company tht only other people at your company care.
I personally wouldn't wanting to be competing with all the other beginner material and sufficiently advanced material would take forever to produce.
But if there was a 100 page book on writing an Elixir/Phoenix app and deploying it on K8s across 4 cloud providers, using a CDN and Aerospike, I'd pay 50$ for that.
A lot of research papers can be found online for free. What problem are you trying to solve that you feel would be helped by advanced material not found in research papers and/or computer science textbooks?
For me, the problems I've encountered that I thought were problems of lack of advanced learning material, have turned out to be problems of absence of tooling, libraries, frameworks and the will to create them.
In my particular case - I became an iOS developer and found out we're still paying people 100k+ to manually create trivial phone apps that fetch trivial database queries via json and display them in rather trivial ways on screens.
You wouldn't believe the number of people working on any given banking app that lets you display your past transactions and transfer money in-between accounts - it's basically a folder/file viewer with pre-defined file types and a couple of pre-defined actions for each. We've had folders, files and transactions to ensure correctness for decades! People are still re-creating these features!
Why do we have separate banking apps that do the exact same thing and why does displaying text fetched from a database and letting you modify it in the most trivial way, a job that pays 100k+ while producing bug ridden code?
There is no book to solve this problem and I believe most of the people employed in software development are churning out or maintaining this type of code. As a result, the market for advanced techniques in computer science is incredibly tiny - if you removed the idiotic whiteboard waterboarding techniques, academia and R&D at big corporations, you'd find out that there is maybe a few thousand people world-wide who are genuinely interested in putting advanced computer science to use.
I'd say this hypothesis explains why we don't have any actual progress in the field, just more javascript frameworks (simplifying, of course ) :) It doesn't explain very well what those billions of dollars in R&D at big corps are accomplishing besides removing ports from laptops and coming up with new keyboard mechanisms that fail when dust falls on them (lol) - maybe we're one day away from a quantum computer that changes everything? I have my doubts :)
Nah, there are lots of people writing big complex programs with big complex architecture. Architecting programs isn't an "advanced compsci topic", but there are lots and lots of books that don't really talk much about it. Instead they show you how to use your programming language's (or framerwork's, database's, etc.) primitives in a basic way. That's pretty much the things you could just look up in a reference manual. Then you figure out the hard stuff yourself.
They tell me how to hold this bundle of hammer and nails, but I need to figure out how to design a skyscraper with them..
If you like writing long form tech guides, do yourself and your audience a favor, figure out how to publish your materials for free digitally and grow an audience you have direct one-on-one access to, then allow people to order paper versions if that’s what they prefer.
Then, writing a book becomes easy: grow audience, provide an outline, get feedback, write more, write testable code, get more feedback, etc.
Anything you write (as in subsection) should have a timestamp of when it was: written, rewritten, last reviewed, test, environment tested, etc.
This is such a silly assertion. Books have been one of the most effective ways for an informed author to get large, complex topics and rich experiences into a another persons head literally since the Roman Empire.
Even in today's world where we have an infinite number of other formats and media to choose from, millions of people still prefer and learn from books. The ability to encode spoken language into a series of written words that can be consumed at a pace the reader controls is one of the most powerful technologies humans have ever invented. And an author taking the time to organize an entire body of work into a single coherent linear narrative is one of the most effective tools to move information across brains.
> I have seen the financial records for number of popular tech book authors
I think what you're trying to say is that conventional tech publishers make no sense economically, and I am inclined to agree with that. The idea that an author can do 90% of the work and get 10% of the royalties is just bananas to me. That kind of royalty sharing only made sense in a time when publishers formed a hermetically sealed cartel preventing independent authors from easily accessing bookshelves. Those days are thankfully over.
It is possible to make decent money from writing technical books if you self publish and build an audience yourself.
Do you have an example of an author doing this? (Meaning all they do is self-publish books and have disclosed financials.)
- estimate of reading time - level of knowledge - way to link deeper content
That said, you would need to have a quantifiable definition of done and likely be a good idea to account for absolute failure in case something comes up an “done” is never accomplished. Until it is “done” likely be good idea to escrow the funds, but then you run into issue like paying taxes, transaction fees, etc.
I've learned dozens of programming languages, and I find programming books increasingly unreadable. They all give me that feeling of ADHD that actual programming heals.
I've also made progress learning various human languages. No single approach works. Doing crosswords in old age doesn't fight off dementia but does make one better at doing crosswords. For language aquisition, read with the sole goal of getting better at reading. Listen with the sole goal of getting better at listening. Repeat phrases in the car as if that's a self-contained game one plays. Then trust that these separate skills will integrate as one travels; they do.
For anyone who has learned the board game of Go, it's interesting how books on Go are compartmentalized. There are books solely dedicated to short timescale tactics, for example.
After a few programming languages, one can easily absorb the "short timescale tactics" of a programming language, and still be at a loss on idiomatic ways to assemble complete programs. Just as the best mathematicans only read original literature, the best programmers simply read code. A programming book can ease the transition to reading code. We should be clear that this is our primary goal.
One experiences a more intense sensation of comprehension, reading and understanding how a short complete program works, than reading any neverending text that ambles on. Take a cue from human language aquisition: Programming books should deliver a sequence of "aha!" moments of comprehension, teaching language constructs through explanations of a sequence of cleanly separated short complete programs. Their success should be measured in terms of the enjoyability and intensity of the experience of reading code this way. Leave it to the reader to find other ways to put together the rest.
In case this is might be helpful, here is a preview of the LA book I wrote[1] and the condensed four-page-in-small-font tutorial version[2]. You might also consider using a computer algebra system for teaching, see [3] for my take on LA using SymPy. Last but not least, I highly recommend the CMapTools software for creating concept maps, which can really summarize the field in a very compact form[4].
[1] https://minireference.com/static/excerpts/noBSguide2LA_previ...
[2] https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/linear_algebra_in...
[3] https://github.com/minireference/noBSLAnotebooks#no-bullshit...
[4] https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/conceptmap.pdf
Apologies, I really tried to make this not sound condescending!
Also, apart from the line:
> You can always ask feedback from people you trust to gain confidence
there is no mention of getting someone to proofread or even copy edit the book. This would also seem really important for a programming book - e.g. to check that the examples work away from the author's dev environment.
You're actually talking two different things.
Someone needs to proofread/copyedit the book. Full stop. And, unless you have a partner or particularly close friend who will/can do a careful edit for you for a case of beer and a pizza, you're going to have to pay someone.
For a programming book (or other types of technical books), you probably need a technical reviewer. If it's just a sanity check for technical accuracy, colleagues etc. can probably do that. But to work through all the code in a book, again, someone will probably have to get paid.
Books need review - not just a few comments on the general concept, but line by line proofreading of the English, and fact checking of every single technical statement.
This is fundamental to the process. It's not an aspiration, it's part of the writing process - because often you'll be writing content while other content is being reviewed, and feedback from both can influence the rest.
All what you mention as missing, is part of my current ongoing process, and I still haven't learned nor tested enough as to summarize it.
I hope the process goes well! Doing what you are doing is really difficult and I have lots of respect for those who try!
I've wanted to create a short video series for my workplace, but I'm stuck on what the approach and theme should be.
The series would be about automotive assembly, and I have a lot of things to talk about, but I keep getting stuck on what people would be interested in and what would be helpful.
Is this about design for manufacturing from an assembly standpoint? Would it also cover repair? The spark plugs on a VR6 are inaccessible, can you fix that?
I have read several IT books recently and they aren't good. Basic stuff like visibility of diagrams, presenting advanced subject matter but also supposedly in a way that will teach you programming, or having pages of code to illustrate something trivial.
No, because then how would it set up pullquotes like "If you don't set a baseline somewhere, you risk starting a book that grows backward" that you can tweet at the push of a button? (Is that really a thing? I guess it must be somewhere, but it's new to me on a (I guess) programmer's blog.)
