

Charles Petzold Departing MSDN Magazine - pjmlp
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/msdnmagazine/archive/2014/10/01/10561803.aspx

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julianpye
Slightly OT, but If you haven't heard about it before Charles book 'Code' is
one of the best computing books I have ever read. I gave it to my engineer
father and my MBA brother for Xmas years ago, as it is such a great
introduction for anyone to understand how computers work. You will also need a
copy if you ever were trying to build a computer from scratch :)

~~~
brudgers
_Code_ is, in my opinion, always relevant when talking about Petzold. After
hearing it mentioned by some podcast pundits I enjoy, I picked up a [dead
tree] copy from Amazon. It is a beautiful and well written book.

In some ways, the bookcraft it expresses reminds me of Tufte's _Visual Display
of Quantitative Information_. But Petzold clearly is drawing more heavily on
story-telling traditions making the book readable even for someone less
interested in the technology.

~~~
zerr
This is in my [long] list of books to read... Could you please clarify if it
would be useful for experienced people as well? (i.e. who have a good
understanding of how computers work from software perspective - had written in
asm, etc...)

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keithwarren
I had been a professional programmer for 10+ years when I read it and it was
full of those moments of clarity where disparate things I 'knew' came together
and made much more sense.

~~~
zerr
Nice. And do you think it will be good as a first book as well?

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keithwarren
Depends on the nature of the reader, but for some people I have hired who were
gifted coders (right out of the gate knew how to approach problems) I would
often give it to them on their first day and they ate it right up.

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ghuntley
See also [http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-acquires-
petzold/](http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-acquires-petzold/)

~~~
jaredsohn
and the Hacker News discussion for this link:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8134165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8134165)

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narag
Having someone like Petzold for a tools company sounds like an excellent idea.
It could be called MDD (for Manual Driven Development) to give it a catchy
name. Many tools seem like nobody bothered to check if it's actually practical
to use them as intended.

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zerr
I wish Xamarin had different way of monetizing... This 90s style shareware is
a real deal-breaker (aka PowerBuilder, Clarion, Delphi).

Hint: Charge for IDE, make raw SDK/compiler available for free.

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chiph
I used Mono forms several years ago, and the performance was a problem. Just
way too slow. I'm certain it's gotten better in the meantime, but given
Charles' experience (I learned Win16 programming from his book!), I think it's
really going to become first class now.

~~~
mgamache
I am pretty sure the Forms in this case refers to Xamarin.Forms developed in
the last year.

[http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-
platform/xamarin-f...](http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-
platform/xamarin-forms/)

~~~
silverbax88
Yes, this would be referring to Xamarin.Forms. It's a slick concept and I've
been coding in it a bit but still should be considered 'beta' in a lot of
regards at this point.

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ZanyProgrammer
I wouldn't mind jumping into Xamarin.Forms dev, but is it still a subscription
based system? Like, the free version only allows you to create really small
programs?

~~~
jdhawk
I've been converting a couple of stupid little apps into Xamarin.IOS and
Xamarin.Android, which has been a fun exercise. The tools are pretty good, and
the community is just large enough to find answers to common problems.

~~~
silverbax88
I attended Xamarin's Evolve conference last week - there were 1200+ attendees.
I think they are definitely a growing community.

