On Sat, 9 Feb 2002, mulix wrote:
> 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"
>
Like Nadav said - by reading the man pages and the TexInfo ones, and/or
online resources. I learned awk at the time by reading the TexInfo page,
and I wrote something quite complex in it. Since then, I had mostly use
perl, but I still use awk for quick and dirty stuff like printing the 5th
field of ls, or summing a series of lines.
For the record, I've learned perl before I learned awk, but I was looking
for something that could be installed on Windows from a diskette. And
DJGPP awk was precisely that. (long story - if anybody wishes to hear it.)
> > 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.
>
You cannot expect "Java Unleashed" (which I did not thoroughly read, but
found interesting and was quite impressed from), to teach you _everything_
there is to know about Java. Java is a very encompassing technology and
its getting worse in this sense. But it can bring you to a stage where you
can advance on your own, and be familiar with all the important caveats of
it.
I don't know how wrong those books could be. I suppose such mutations
exist, considering the fact that for every popular technology there are
many books that cover it and compete on the same grounds.
In the first workplace I seriously worked with UNIX, my supervisor (who
was my UNIX guru at the time) said he did not read a computing book in his
life. Yet, he was a very good and experienced hacker. Hackers can survive
without books at all, or with very proffesional / philosophical /
high-level / hackerdom-oriented books. But not all people are like that.
So, I think these books - if properly written, of course - have their
place in our society. I think it is conceivable to write a book that will
teach someone HTML or Perl or Java or C, or whatever, that will be able to
make sure that the readers _knows_ it and not just _thinks he does_. Even
if the reader is not a hacker by heart.
> > 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.
>
Well, so do I. However, I think that such books can teach you enough to
become a professional, although not very experienced programmer in a
certain technology.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
> [followups should probably go to hackers-il?]
> --
> mulix
>
> http://vipe.technion.ac.il/~mulix/
> http://syscalltrack.sf.net/
>
>
>
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Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
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