A better way to read programming books
I tried a different approach to reading a programming book recently, and it seemed to have worked out better. I started reading from the last chapter and then moving back. If it’s a typical book introducing new technology or language, most likely the last few chapters present some advanced concepts about the language or technology, and some books include some heavy-weight practical projects that are applicable for the real world.
What do you usually get when you read a book from the beginning to the end? A whole bunch of introductions to such concepts as variables, functions, loops, conditional statements and benefits of object-oriented or whatever approaches the author advocates. The information value of those chapters is very minimal, unless you have not read a single programming book previously, and this is indeed your first language or technology.
When you start at the end, you’re usually presented with
1) a good description of the best usage scenarios for the technology
2) a sample of how well-written code looks like in this language
3) all the shortcuts and more or less real-world code used, no one is spelling out if-else statement with extraneous comments anymore
4) a good feeling of whether you generally “dig” what’s going on
Try it out. Pick up some random book (Python, C#.NET, Rails, etc.) and head off to the last chapter. I think that you’ll be less bored overall and will get a better dive-in introduction than following the first few chapters.
January 20th, 2007 at 12:09 pm #Jaap Heimans
not quite.
most programming books are organized along topics. That bit we agree on. And indeed you may skip the bit on variables and programming in general.
What I usually try to figure out is whether the author has good pedagogical skills, i.e is he/she a good storyteller, does he/she has some wit, and does he/she stand above the material he/she teaches?
In general I find a good writer a far better recommendation than anything else, although I do scan the chapter titles for relevance to my subject.
January 21st, 2007 at 2:15 am #Sergey Chernyshev
Is started Ruby Pike Axe 2 from the beginning - in this case it worth it because I tried to understand why I need this language and that’s also a reason why I started with Ruby book, not Roby on Rails book - I like to know details.
BTW, The end of this book is a list of class libraries and how to work with Threads, IO and so on - this is not that interesting because these things are almost the same among many languages.