On Sat, 30 Mar 2002, Stephan B. Wessels wrote:
On 3/30/02 3:09 PM, "Bijan Parsia" bparsia@email.unc.edu wrote:
You might get someone to write "Squeak for dummies".
The chief value of which, afaict, would be that there would be a Squeak book that I would not, and would not *want*, to own.
No no no. Free market system alert.
No no no. I *am* using the Free market system. I tend to buy/collect Smalltalk books. I strictly avoid "for Dummies" etc. books.
I'll buy the book just to: 1) encourage the author to write more Squeak books
If it's not an author I already know, I would still want to discourage them from writing *such* books.
2) encourage the publisher to publish more Squeak books
Similarly. Really. An O'Reilly book has some cachet. A For Dummies book just sucks. IMHO.
3) to show people that there really are all kinds of Squeak books
available when they see my technical reference shelf. Squeak books are top shelf right next to Smalltalk-80.
Yes yes. I own all the Squeak books and most of the Smalltalk books and quite a few Prolog books (oops).
You know where my Java books are, right?
That's a little bit on the silly side. But I tend to encourage anything that promotes Squeak.
I *hope* it is evident that I do to. But that tendancy gets overridden on occasion. I can't see doing all that much for the sake of a For Dummies book.
But that's just me. I really hate the For Dummies type books. Really really. I have no problem with *introductory* books, but I think we can do better in general.
There are flaws in the current set of Squeak books, but at least they exist :) I'm watching the Ruby shelf, and that set of books is growing faster, but I find them, overall, to be rather unpleasent (IMHO). Indeed, a turn off. Python suffered a bit from this too.
We have a good textbook, a really need anthology, and an interesting tutorialy thingy. Just keeping them updated (they aren't!) is a huge task. Churning out a slew of crap books seems a waste.
I, of course, wouldn't *sabotage* a Squeak for Dummies, but I hereby discourage it.
Cheers, Bijan "Java sucks" Parsia.