After doing something long enough, a person loses his qualifications to judge the value of an introductory-level work.

True for some, but not all of us. For some years I taught my native language to foreigners and had to make decisions on the approbriate textbook. I don't think first year students are more qualified than me, to judge which language textbook is better for them. Of course its no easy job to judge a textbook and I have spent a lot of (mostly unpaid) time in reviewing beginners textbooks. That does not mean, that I am not interested in reviews and opinions by beginners; they are helpful as well. And they helped me to do my job better.

While these kind of information is helpful and interesting a book review is much more than "it worked for me" or "it doesn't work for me" . Believe me or not, but reviewing a book (in a fair way) is pretty hard work. I believe that many of the more advanced Perl Monks are able to review a book like the Llama Book in a fair way, but this won't be done in just a few minutes or an hour, but will take many hours or days.

Hanamaki

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Book Ranking by Hanamaki
in thread Book Ranking by hsmyers

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.