Re: Community review

Not at all easy, and I wonder whether it would be useful. Sure, if everyone has the same opinion it isn't too hard, but I would give such a review much weigth. But if people have different views, you'll end up with a review that's a compromise. A review by committee. And while many things could easily be done by a committee, I don't think they should make reviews.

A practical example. Many people here tend to love O'Reilly books and would write praising reviews. I, on the other hand, have yet to find an O'Reilly book that I would rate as "good" (7 on a scale of 10 for the best books, but most wouldn't get more than a 5). I don't think I could write a review with someone who thinks a book is good, while I think it's bad. What should the review say, that it's an average book?

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's not going to be easy, and I have my doubts on the results.

Abigail

Comment on Re: Community review

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Re: Re: Community review by cjf (Parson) on Jun 07, 2002 at 13:14 UTC
I, on the other hand, have yet to find an O'Reilly book that I would rate as "good" I've always liked dissenting opinions :). Just curious, what are your major complaints about O'Reilly books? Do you think there are many common problems between their books? If you've read it, what's your opinion of Programming Perl 3rd ed.? What technical books would you rate as "good" or better?	[reply]
Re: Community review by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Jun 07, 2002 at 13:44 UTC
Well, my major complaint is that in most (if not all) O'Reilly books, the author is considered to be God (to quote one author of an O'Reilly book). There's too much "this is how it is" and "this is how you solve this particular problem". There is hardly any explaination why things are the way they are. If O'Reilly books learn you something, it's just a bunch of tricks. It's hard to gain actual insight from O'Reilly books. Another problem with O'Reilly books is the index. The index of the first print of Programming Perl 3rd edition was missing something very essential, either "Regular Expression" or "Regex". (Don't have the book here, so I cannot check). You seldom see a reference in O'Reilly, and if you see one, it's mostly to one of their own books. Note that O'Reilly isn't the only publisher whose books are "lacking", it happens with other publishers too. I just mentioned O'Reilly because there are so many people dweeping with them. As if having an animal on your cover makes the content good. When it comes to technical books, I generally find Addison-Wesley of a higher quality (but that doesn't mean every A-W book is good!). One book I really like (and I've learn more Perl from it than all "Perl" books combined) is Stevens' "Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment". Then there's of course Knuth. If you want to know how an index such look like, look in the back of "The Art of Computer Programming". And don't forget to check out the reference section as well. Abigail	[reply]
Re: Re: Community review by ignatz (Vicar) on Jun 07, 2002 at 14:38 UTC
I can certainly understand why at least one of the authors of Programming Perl might be considered "God" when it comes the the book's subject matter. If you're going to slam it, you might want to come up with something a bit less nit-picky than the fact that the chapter is called Pattern Matching instead of Regular Expressions. While it is true that many of the O'Reilly books are in the get s___ done format as opposed to the overly theoretical, that is certainly not a blanket description of their catalogue. As much as I love Knuth's work, it's not something that I keep in my cubby hole at work when I need to figure out why my DHTML isn't working in Netscape 4.05, or what JavaScript method I need to talk between browsers or how to hack out a quick Perl script for porting a bunch of botched CSV files over to Oracle. Theory is great for my enlightenment, but I get paid to solve "particular problem"s. O'Reilly has been very very good to me it that regards. ()-() \"/ `	[reply]