It doesn't sound like you are iterating on this. Look at the code you are not happy with. What is wrong? Can you fix it? If so, try to do those things next time. Don't stop the process.
Totally agree, and I'll piggyback this to say that the quality is not always too important either. Worrying about whether the book you are learning from is "the best" is not as productive as getting on with learning the language. A book really only has to good enough not to teach bad habits or explain concepts incorrectly.
I've also had similar experiences with Java, nevermind Javascript.
It is an utter and simple fact that due to tech being an everchanging landscape, any book more than a few years old is going to teach bad habits or explain concepts incorrectly.
>It is an utter and simple fact that due to tech being an everchanging landscape, any book more than a few years old is going to teach bad habits or explain concepts incorrectly.
Concepts change meaning and good habits turn bad every few years?
Shitty books are shitty, OKish books will be probably be fine for a language intro, even if they are old.
That's why I like old books at libraries. They were from a time where the research / book ratio was better. People in research centers didn't write about trivial stuff. That's why math is so nice (when you can parse it), very general and aiming at timeless.
>The FPGA also lacks an open-source (or even shared-source) toolchain,
I think this point is overstated. FPGAs are not microprocessors. I don't think an OSS toolchain would be anywhere near as beneficial as something like gcc. It would be nice to have but it's hard to think of any problems specific to programmable logic that this would address.
What would help is toolsets with less friction and less of an entry barrier.
Implementing your own routing algorithms, running these procedures in parallel on a cluster (something like distcc) and things like that would really benefit FPGA industry. The area is full of research problems, but only Xilinx progarammers and a few other companies are allowed to do research in this area and try their ideas. Well, some file formats are open (xdl/ncd files), but you have to reimplement everything from scratch.
Japanese developers from that era are famously secretive. I have heard that Nintendo has a reputation for being particularly shortcoming with information to journalists or historians.
A surprisingly huge amount of modern science is formalising and quantifying existing knowledge. I would say that they either discovered this by chance or adopted it from another group that made the discovery - they had access to a very wide range of folk remedies from across the Roman empire.
They may have had no insight into how or why this worked other than drinking ash tonics makes you feel better than not drinking them.
