Thursday, June 28, 2007

O'Reilly Oddness

I shouldn't have been so harsh on Michael Fitzgerald and his book. I forgot O'Reilly has some editorial ideas that make their books tough to read. The biggest one is "Chapter 2 should summarize the language in one chapter", which should really go into an appendix. Someone who has a pretty good idea of programming could easily read that.

It's bad for beginners to have such a chapter at the beginning because it's completely intimidating, and scares readers off.

In my mind, "quick tours" are a bad idea.

No comments: