
A Short Story About Verbosity - Swizec
http://prog21.dadgum.com/65.html
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gnat
I don't know who the publisher was, but it doesn't sound like O'Reilly. When I
worked for them (in the 2000s) our mantra was that the right size for a book
is however long it has to be to say what has to be said. There's a minimum
length of around 120-150 pages, below which it's hard to have a visible cover
on the spine, but there's no inherent benefit to 600 page books versus 250.
With ebooks, of course, there's no such thing as a minimum size: it's whatever
there's a market for.

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Angostura
In my experience, the technical books to avoid are the really fat ones with
more than four authors. There is usually little coordination between authors,
meaning inconsistencies, holes, repetition abounds.

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pauljburke
At least one of the publishers thoughtfully sticks (or at least used to) the
pictures of all the authors on the front cover. Finding people that have both
the time and knowledge to write about a particularly in-demand technology is
difficult, I had a publisher I particularly respect approach me to write about
SQL Server + XML years ago and I just didn't have the time ... of course if
someone asks you for "just a chapter or two" and you think you have something
interesting to add (note it was never about the money, at an hourly rate it
truly sucked) you might feel like contributing to a "cut & shut" as I like to
think of them. Of course if you take that approach you need a really good
editing team/overview which doesn't always happen.

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jonnathanson
My best guess about the "600 pages" rule is that such a length gives the book
a nice, thick spine, and a nice, thick spine is a great place to plant a
catchy title in enormous lettering. That probably helped when selling the book
on shelves. Furthermore, length could be used as a proxy for
comprehensiveness, which helped when selling the book through B2B channels,
like corporations, academia, etc. (Oftentimes, such buyers were more likely to
complain about what a book _didn't_ contain than what it did, hence, the drive
toward kitchen-sinkism).

All of which was great for sales back in the day, but not so great for the
quality of the books.

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Derbasti
The book Don't Make Me Think states that it is meant to be easily readable
during one intercontinental flight. I think that is a good length for an
introductory book.

I have read a introductory books about programming languages. Usually, all I
really need is a good introduction into the syntax and a pointers to the
strenghts and peculiarities of a language. All the rest I will have to figure
out while programming anyways. Sadly though, this means that I will typically
only read about half the book.

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mrbill
With the rise in popularity of ebooks, "number of pages" hopefully will come
to matter less, as you'll care more about "quality of content" than "does this
paper book feel thick and hefty and worth the $40+ price".

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ekianjo
Not sure where most people stand on this, but if I buy a technical reference
book, there is no way I want it to have only as a ebook format. If possible,
I'd want to have both print and digital version. Unless you have multiple
screens, it becomes very tedious to read the ebook and type your own code at
the same time. Of course, an e-reader would help, but it's still nowhere as
practical when you just want to "browse" in the contents of the book. Books
are big, take space, are heavy to carry, but they have several functions that
ebooks cannot replicate easily.

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bentlegen
Technical books are overpriced?

The print edition of our book — Third-party JavaScript — sells for $45 (during
a promotion it can frequently be had for much less). Besides teaching you how
to properly write third-party scripts, it guides you through some pretty nasty
browser quirks and bugs – issues you might not have known even existed.

If you were to encounter and debug these issues on your own, it could easily
cost your firm hundreds – possibly even thousands – of dollars. At which point
$45 (and the time to read the book) begins to look like a sound investment.

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Swizec
From the perspective of an organization, technical books are cheap.

From the perspective of an autodidact, technical books are expensive.

From the perspective of a student buying "textbooks", technical books are
expensive as hell.

Considering the existence of internet, google, stackoverflow and technical
blogs, technical books are silly expensive, take too long to get to the point
and are borderline useless.

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derleth
> technical books are silly expensive, take too long to get to the point and
> are borderline useless.

Hey, don't tar the whole field with the sins of 99.9% of the elements. Some
technical books (those by W. Richard Stevens, K&R, Knuth, and a few others)
are wonderful resources.

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ken
I mean no disrespect to Knuth, but he seems an odd choice to include in this
list. Are you saying his books are exemplars of cheap, fast, or practical?

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kamaal
At the very same time very small technical books aren't good either.

I mean to say small books with only facts in them, really don't help at all.
They may serve well as a reference once you know everything about the subject
not in general.

A good technical book is something that gives out some facts and then make you
think about it. Shows you the possibilities of what can be done with the facts
presented, how you can use them, and show you the far implications of the
facts.

Its quite a rarity to read books like OnLisp, K&R C, Higher order Perl, The
joy of clojure etc.

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noelwelsh
With e-books this shouldn't be an issue, as you can sell smaller units of
product -- for example, just a chapter -- without incurring the cost of
shipping, carrying excess inventory, etc. It seems the main players in the
e-book market (Apple and Amazon) are sticking to a fairly conventional model
but I think the industry is still open to disruption.

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chx
I dunno. I have written a couple tech book chapters in my life and tech edited
a lot more books. I suspect it's not (always) the fluff much rather the fact
that explaining stuff in a way that it deserves printing takes a helluva lot
more than just throwing up a blogpost.

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evincarofautumn
This reminds me of a quote by our friendly neighbourhood enigma, why the lucky
stiff: “Attempt to search on Amazon for anything that’s a beginners’ text of,
oh, let’s say the 80-page range”. As far as the Little Coder’s Predicament
goes, there’s no doubt in my mind that we ought to focus on books that are as
concise, fun, and immediately useful as possible. Unfortunately, the vast
majority of people who _already_ program are not concerned with the Little
Coders and their plight, and thus 600-page tomes abound.

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K2h
Reminded me of the quote from Blaise Pascal [1]

"..I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to
make it shorter."

[1] <http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=177502>

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iamabrony
Well, not for long. You can find many books here. The site is slow as
molasses, but the selection is very good.

<http://en.bookfi.org/>

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AdamGibbins
I'm on a 3G connection currently (in southern England), and the site loads and
searches instantly. Nice find, thanks.

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alorres
"I don't mean in the vague sense of sitting in a coffeeshop with my laptop and
pretending to be a writer."

Yes, that definitely was not vague.

