Chris Sells is asking his Windows Forms Programming Readership what he should do about the 2nd edition.
It got me thinking about what I like and dislike about technology books. I remember, when I first started out in Computer Science (~2001), walking into the computer section at my local giant bookstore, looking for books about how to design applications, design classes, how to program effectively, how should technology X be used effectively. I wanted to know what was important and what wasn’t. What did the pros do?
Well, I was disappointed with what I had to choose from. My choices were thick, heavy books at an outrageous price (damn the exchange rate!) that covered everything about technology X. There weren’t many on the topics that I thought I wanted. Professional C# Programming. Programming Robots with JINI. Essential ASP.NET. How to run a Linux Web Server Farm. Python explained. Now with 1300 pages of real-world sample application code! (I should not have to bother mentioning those Learn-everything-about-programming-in-five-minutes books. Those are beneath my contempt. I’m not talking about those. This guy does though.) Being rather green, I concluded that those books must contain what I want as well as a lot of other stuff that can’t really hurt anyway. So I bought some. I’d maybe look at a few chapters focussed on a particular topic. Then it would go on the bookshelf and stay there to be moved to my next apartment, another reason for detesting the grotesquely huge publications.
Now I’m more experienced with programming and buying computer books. I’ve learned my lesson. I’m wary of anything bigger than a few hundred pages. Those big fatties didn’t contain what I wanted to learn about. Or, if they did, they didn’t cover the topic deep enough, so I was forced to do it myself anyway. They focussed on a lot of how to do something, and not very much on when and why.
One idea Wrox had that I really liked was the Handbook. They were focussed, little books on a particular topic. And I mean particular. I managed to get a few on .NET topics from Code Access Security to Serialization to Scalability. I thought those were great. And that’s what I look for now in a book. Short, sweet and only covers one thing.
Those books are very rare, though, probably not profitable.
