On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, Shlomi Fish wrote: > On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, mulix wrote: > > > sorely lacking. on the other hand, anything by adison wesley, oreilly or > > prentic hall is usually a very good buy. ymmv. > > I would not say that anything by O'Reilly, etc. is a very good buy. For > instance, I don't see the point of buying an entire book just to learn > "Sed and Awk". And I bet that it would be redundant to buy some of > their Perl books. Don't get me wrong, their books are usually very > professional and all, but they are sometimes too specific.
then how would you suggest one learn sed & awk? note - when i say learn i really do mean learn. note "write one script based on the examples and call it quits" > As for the Unleashed, Teach yourself, etc. Those books are obviously > intended for a less professional crowd who wishes to become familiar with > a given technology as quickly as possible, while being made aware of all > the caveats it contains. Some of them are actually pretty good, although > expert hackers may find them too slow-paced. (how to create a button... > how to create a listbox... how to create a combo-box...) i have read several unleashed/24/using books, and all of them were either incomplete, shallow or plain wrong. someone who *thinks* he knows something but is wrong is a lot more dangerous than someone who simply doesn't know. > My problem is that I have an on-demand way of learning something new. What > I mean is that I use a sub-set of the technology and when I need more, or > feel that something is missing, I learn it by looking for info on the web. > That's not the best way of mastering something, but I seem to like it. > Besides, I'm almost sure nobody uses the whole of C++, Perl, Common Lisp, > etc. Those languages have so much redundency over Turing Completeness, > that using a subset will not hurt too much. ;-) you need to differentiate between "learning enough to get the job done" and "becoming a guru on the subject". when talking about book learning, i usually refer to the second definition. for the first, the web/manuals/examples/source code is almost always enough, if you have the underlying theory. [followups should probably go to hackers-il?] -- mulix http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~mulix/ http://syscalltrack.sf.net/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
