Runester

I’ve bought lots of technical books, and continue to buy these monstrosities … all in my bid to stay afloat in a world of ever changing tech fads. I need to keep ahead of my managers, and stay looking good while I’m at it. The problem, is that these books are not bought for enjoyment, they have a job to do … and when they don’t do it or they do it poorly … I am worse off then before!

If you’ve never seen a tech book, imagine a phone book but written entirely in unpronounceable foreign names. Oh, and you have to pay $35 to $55 for it. Some a really good (I like the O’Reilly books, especially PERL, 3rd edition). Most are not … I’m looking at you “… unleashed” series (”Linux Unleashed”, “Web Programming Unleashed”, etc.). The problem with tech books, is that they all fall in these three, irritating, groups.

350 Page Overview

Give me a break! The whole book turns out to be a high level overview of a technical subject, aimed more at the IT manager then someone actually expected to complete an assignment and get the technology to work. On the other hand, no one in management has the three weeks it takes to read a 350 page ‘overview’ of a single technology. Do you know how frustrating it is to read page after page of “what HTML is…” or “the history of CGI…” without a single example piece of code or reference to any keywords or anything else that could be construed as applicable? You keep reading, for a while, hoping to get past the overview and begin digging into the real “meat and potato’s” only to discover with increasing horror that there is no meal, just appetizer after pathetic page of appetizer.

New rule, if it’s just an overview, make it under 25 pages and clearly label it as such. Thanks.

A bucket full of nails, no hammer, no wood

These are almost exactly the opposite of the 350 Page Overview described above. They are full of tiny, trivial, minutiae … and nothing else. These books will explain in a multi-chapter context how to toggle each individual pin in an RS-232 connector … but not how to set up or use a serial connection between two machines. They’ll discuss how to make system calls, with an exhaustive list of available calls, but not why or how to use them. It really is like going to a hardware store and buying a bucket of different sized nails. Boy, they sure would be useful if only you had some wood to nail … and a hammer to nail with … and something in mind to build with all of this. But, no … you’ve just got the nails. These books are good for keeping around after you learn the material from somewhere else. They make good reference books, especially when you need details at that level. If you make the mistake of trying to learn a new technology from these books, or even solve a specific problem … you are out of luck. This is all theory no application.

One of the subcategories in this category would be programming language books that spend 12 of 13 chapters talking about internals (like making and sorting lists, iterators, and flow control) and then mention briefly, in chapter 13 how to do mundane operations like print something on the screen or elicit a users input. Come on! You mean that all a programmer ever has to do is create and sort lists? It never occurs to the writer that getting the data into the list by querying the user or reading a file or polling some device … that these might be important parts of programming? It’s as if the book was written by a Computer Science professor enamored with how well his language solves computer science problems … and who has a mild disdain for lowly scripters who would want to waste their time automating daily processes or parse a web page for content. A tool, no matter how beautiful, complex, and intricate, that doesn’t actually DO anything … isn’t much of a tool.

Remember, buying a bucket of nails does not qualify you to build a house. Besides the obvious need for wood and other materials, you also have to know how (and why) to put them all together. New rule, remember that this book is being bought by people who have to “do stuff” and not just admire the product. Make it practical or don’t bother.

I’m a big bad ADMIN, pay me now …

There have been some tech books that were apparently written by drunken monkeys with broken keyboards. The book is supposed to be a treatise on LINUX security, written by a hot shot admin who has been a Linux guru for over a decade. On the other hand, the book is full of typo’s, spelling mistakes, and portions obviously scanned and copied out of other books (probably user manuals). Trying to find a gem in this dung heap was more work then it was worth … but at least I didn’t pay the $35 for it … it was in a discount bin. marked $8.95. Now I know why.

New rule, if you are going to use your experience to write a technical manual … great! Try running it through a spell checker and then a human editor, and don’t forget to put something useful in there. You don’t _have_ too … but then, you too could be sharing space in the discount bin.

Well, I’ve gotten that off my chest and I feel a little better. Mostly I like online documents because they are where I need them and they don’t cost me anything … and I can use search features instead of thumbing through hundreds of pages. Still, my PERL book is my favorite and excels in exactly the ways that the above described books fail. Yeah PERL, Yeah O’Reilly associates!