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I highly doubt there is any difference, since the only difference is the medium. If a book is published online, it's still a book.
by nilved 10y ago
I highly doubt there is any difference, since the only difference is the medium. If a book is published online, it's still a book.
- andrew3726 10y agoI think you're missing the point. It's not about electronic book vs physical book (If I misunterstood you, sorry and dismiss this post). It's more about the sources on the internet, I don't know many people who read complete books on the computer but rather just read relevant sections somewhere online. While this isn't bad per se, you often miss important details due to different sources (and therefore different views/reader assumptions, ...).
- sklogic 10y agoThey tend to be very different kinds of books. A comprehensive, deep printed textbook vs. what is essentially nothing more than a tutorial or a collection of practical recipes.
- nilved 10y agoDoes reading _Learn You a Haskell_ online make it any less of a book? My point is that "online sources" is a superset of "books", making them incomparable.
- Jtsummers 10y agoNo. However a lot of the things I, anecdata, find when I do a google search aren't books, but blogs and random tutorials and stackoverflow. Books, due to their published nature, tend to have a greater, more thorough, effort put into them. They are generally well laid out, usually well edited, and because people spent money on them the good ones tended to stay in the market and the bad ones tended to drop out. There's no fundamental difference (except for me, I do much better at recalling things I read from physical books than ebooks), in the source of online versus offline. But it's hard to ignore the difference in quality that tends to happen. What would be nice, and this is probably done somewhere, would be a reliable aggregator of good online documentation (whether it's an ebook version of a published text or not). Somewhere we can vet and see vetted quality sources of tutorials, manuals, etc.
- sklogic 10y agoThis is among very few exceptions. Most of the books are still proper books (no matter if they're also available as e-books). Most of the stuff people use for learning online is far below a book quality.
- mathgeek 10y ago> If a book is published online, it's still a book. reply Not really arguing the medium of actual books (which is why I specified in my previous post). More a comparison between topic-specific books and blog posts / StackOverflow.