in reply to What's missing in Perl books?

Screw understanding Perl. Write something about understanding programming. This mythical book would start with logic, work through metalogic, wend its way through data structures, have some tea and biscuits with people skills, discuss verification of design and function, and, on page 726, introduce the concept of the editor. At no time does this book have a single code listing in any language. Period. Oh, and it'd be accessible to my very smart 10-year old, yet engaging enough for a college student.

Why, you may ask? Because people can write garbage in every language. And, frankly, 99.9999999% of all programs are GARBAGE, pure and simple. They are unrecoverable, barely maintainable, buggy and insecure dreck.

"Oh, dragonchild. You're exagerrating." Uh ... no, I'm not. And every single person who reads this that has worked in more than 3 companies is unconciously nodding their collective heads right now. If enough people read this at the same time, there'd be a measurable wobble in the Earth's orbit. It is really and truly that bad.

My criteria for good software:
  1. Does it work?
  2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: What's missing in Perl books?
by xdg (Monsignor) on Nov 16, 2005 at 05:08 UTC

    Well, comments in HOP and an Amazon review of it got me interested enough to borrow Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs from an MIT friend who was a TA for the course. Sorry to say that I don't think it's accessable to a 10-year-old and is definitely a bit light on the people skills part (grin). I'm struggling to find the free tuits to work my way through it, though I've enjoyed what I've read so far. From what I can tell, it pretty much builds up to very advanced programming concepts almost entirely from scratch.

    -xdg

    Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

[reply]
Re^2: What's missing in Perl books?
by hv (Prior) on Nov 16, 2005 at 12:48 UTC

    That sounds surprisingly similar to my comments on Creating an Intermediate Perl Programming Curriculum, except for the language-agnostic aspects.

    I agree that "how to think like a programmer" is the sort of thing I'd love more people to understand. However for (wannabe) Perl programmers there are many language-specific areas that it would be useful to include, ie community resources and the like; it would be difficult to expand that to represent appropriate information about every language out there, but leaving the information out would reduce the utility of such a book greatly.

    For myself, I stopped reading technical books a long time ago. I'd be far more interested in a book of meditations, a collection of things along the lines of Joel's essays from people such as Larry that think meta and create interesting analogies.

    Hugo

[reply]
      However for (wannabe) Perl programmers there are many language-specific areas that it would be useful to include, ie community resources and the like; it would be difficult to expand that to represent appropriate information about every language out there, but leaving the information out would reduce the utility of such a book greatly.

      I learned how to type in several programming languages before I learned how to program. I would say that I learned how to program about 2-3 years ago. Since then, I've picked up a couple new languages, including my current interest, Ruby. In 2 weeks, I've been able to program at a very high level in Ruby, solely because I know how to program.

      Once someone groks programming, there is no language that cannot be learned and mastered very quickly. The concepts are the tough part - syntax is easy.

      My criteria for good software:
      1. Does it work?
      2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
[reply]

In Section Meditations