

Technical Books Are Broken - ringmaster
http://asymptomatic.net/2012/04/09/2950/technical-books-are-broken

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swalberg
The comment about "For Dummies" irks me.

I was the main author on a For Dummies book and the whole point is to provide
step by step actions to guide a complete newbie through the procedure. It's
intentionally done that way because that's what the audience wants. They don't
want to read it cover to cover, they want to pick up the book, open it to the
section called "Installing a wireless network card for Windows Vista" and
follow the instructions. When they want to read sections, they want to read
something that speaks to them, not something that assumes they've read it all
up to that point.

Technical books may have failed a certain segment of the population (I agree
with many of his points if I look at it from my own perspective), but I know a
lot of technical authors who make a fine living writing books, which means
that people are buying them.

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showerst
There are three kinds of tech books in my mind - Reference, Tutorial, and
Fundamentals.

I can sort of understand wanting paper reference books, since it can be nicer
to just flip around instead of googling, but it seems silly to complain about
recency, since that's the _obvious_ tradeoff in getting a paper book instead
of just googling for the wc3schools page on the <section> tag.

Tutorial books are a tougher one, because it's really hard to nail the
audience. Is it really for beginner beginners who don't even know syntax, or
just for programmers who are new to the language? Dummies books are for one
group, the pickaxe ruby book is for another. I do feel like Oreilly has been
nailing this recently, releasing a number of small but info-heavy tutorial
books on things like stats and machine learning, while also pushing out their
bread & butter 800 page language/MS Office books, and the Head First series
for people new to the programming world.

With new versions of CRLS and Knuth in the past year or two, the fundamentals
world is doing ok, although since they're primarily textbooks it may be a
while before we see them in ebook format =(.

~~~
jowiar
Other way around - I can see zero point in paper reference books. Having all
my reference books sitting on my hard drive and using Spotlight works far
better than actually grabbing the right book and finding the right page.

E-book has far less advantage over paper when the material is being consumed
sequentially.

~~~
adestefan
I get more out of paper reference books than electronic reference materials.
When I need a reference book it's usually because I can't remember something
exactly, but do know the idea I'm trying to find. For me, it's much easier to
skim through a paper reference manual, than to try to do the same in
electronic documentation.

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sycren
I would like to see innovation in books like this <http://vimeo.com/15142335>

Linking content in the books to outside real-time resources.

Alternatively, what would you think of a subscription based purchase model for
a book where each year you pay $3-10/year for a book which is continuously
being updated?

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ChuckMcM
There was an interesting footer that was present on all wiki pages inside of
Google which read "Obsolete if printed" which was to remind you that if you
printed something out and were referring back to it, it had probably changed
and you should get the new version.

That being said, technical references have two roles, one to provide a
reference 'now' and one to provide a reference 'then'. I could imagine that
there is a market for an 'ebook' type thing which is a combination 'git repo /
document' where you could read it like a reference book on your ebook reader,
but you could slide a 'timeline' type slider which would assemble it from the
document as it appeared at that time. Would be a fairly complex document, but
really really useful.

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revolvingcur
I felt a sharp pang of nostalgia seeing the cover of "Write Your Own Adventure
Programs". That book, and similar titles, were already old by the time I came
across ragged copies of them in my public library, but I spent countless hours
of my middle school years painstakingly typing out their listings and seeing
the results on my second-hand 386's amber monochrome CRT.

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bwooceli
To my mind the Django documentation is among the best examples of what
technical reference can and should be - ever evolving and dynamic.

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mephi5t0
Yes they are. Every time I tap a link within the book it doesn't go anywhere.
Pagination is really bad, old school. Search sucks. Not to mention code
samples never work.

