Dan Shafer wrote:
Yeah, it was less the mistake itself than the questions it raised in
my mind. If several hundred people have bought this book in one form
or another and nobody has yet pointed out this error -- which made
the major example in the book not work -- does this mean: (a) they
figured it out themselves (it *was* sort of obvious on one level);
(b) they didn't catch it at all; or (c) they haven't read the chapter
(or perhaps the book)?
Dan, I have your book. I read it all, I did maybe 50% of the samples -
the choice of which ones I did versus which ones I did not do wasn't
particularly because I thought were necessary, or interesting or
anything .... it was based simply on whether I was reading that section
in the office, the kitchen or the bath :-) That's one of the joys of
a printed book.
I have no recollection whether I did or didn't do this particular one,
but if I did I must have figured it out without noticing. (Had I
noticed, I'd have whined .... sorry, I'd have given feedback to the author.)
As a writer, I know mistakes will appear in my code. I try hard to
test it and then copy-paste code directly rather than retyping it.
Over the years, reviewers have been consistently kind about the
paucity of at least code errors in my books. That's a rep I'd like
not to tarnish more than necessary.
Next time, I need to find copy-readers who are perhaps less
knowledgeable and who have and can take more time to review copy in
greater detail.
This may be impractical ....
Can you apply automated testing techniques to the code intended for
inclusion in the book ?
(including the process of getting the code from its original place to
the publisher's production process) ?
Alternatively, could you devise a method to take the (about to be)
published version, automatically extract from it the code samples and
put them into a test framework. I don't know what you use for
preparation of such books, but many, many years ago I was writing
reference docs for software libraries (in Framemaker), and we'd use
paragraph tags in the Frame document to indicate code samples to
extract, with enough info to determine where each sample should fit in
the test framework. It was possible (but really quite hard) to get the
code to appear in the printed book without also getting it into the test
code.
--
Alex Tweedly http://www.tweedly.net
--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.338 / Virus Database: 267.9.6/59 - Release Date: 27/07/2005
_______________________________________________
use-revolution mailing list
[email protected]
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
