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I own the small predecessor “C++-Standardbibliothek - kurz & gut” and being happy with it. Im interested in therefore in this edition. But I miss here a printe

I own the small predecessor “C++-Standardbibliothek - kurz & gut” and being happy with it. Im interested in therefore in this edition. But I miss here a printed version?

tialaramex 4y ago
I actually feel like a printed reference is proportionally less useful than it once was, as ease of reading electronic documents improved (you can buy a Kindle e.g.) and it became more and more valuable to be able to copy-paste which is frustrating with print. For example Godbolt ("Compiler Explorer") and similar suck-it-and-see sites are really nice for taking example code and answering your questions, if I copy-paste the example from a book, and tweak it, assuming the author did their job and the code actually works (this was too often not the case in older books) I can check it works as I expected. If I had to laboriously hand type the example that's much harder for the same value. Even twenty years ago it was common to offer larger pieces of code from technical books as downloads, but unlike copy-paste the downloads only pay off for larger codebases. If your book builds a 40 000 line library of structures and algorithms, the download is great, but for a twenty line example the download is almost as cumbersome as hand typing it, copy-paste is right in the sweet spot for this. I do own one or two very modern programming books in hard copy, but they're mostly not "that sort" of books where you'd want to run example code, and I'm increasingly ambivalent about the value of the printed book in this space, whereas I only read novels on paper.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Kindle is great for books I read front to back, but for jumping around in references experience is bad. For reading references I prefer HTML in a browser where I can have multiple tabs on multiple sections and where I can do "open this link in background so I can get back to it after finishing this paragraph" But many reference style books I tend to go for the physical book, where I can jump back and forth quickly. Combined with my brain which has a surprising quality in remembering where in a book something was said ...

I own the small predecessor “C++-Standardbibliothek - kurz & gut” and being happy with it. Im interested in therefore in this edition. But I miss here a printed version?

tialaramex 4y ago

I actually feel like a printed reference is proportionally less useful than it once was, as ease of reading electronic documents improved (you can buy a Kindle e.g.) and it became more and more valuable to be able to copy-paste which is frustrating with print. For example Godbolt ("Compiler Explorer") and similar suck-it-and-see sites are really nice for taking example code and answering your questions, if I copy-paste the example from a book, and tweak it, assuming the author did their job and the code actually works (this was too often not the case in older books) I can check it works as I expected. If I had to laboriously hand type the example that's much harder for the same value. Even twenty years ago it was common to offer larger pieces of code from technical books as downloads, but unlike copy-paste the downloads only pay off for larger codebases. If your book builds a 40 000 line library of structures and algorithms, the download is great, but for a twenty line example the download is almost as cumbersome as hand typing it, copy-paste is right in the sweet spot for this. I do own one or two very modern programming books in hard copy, but they're mostly not "that sort" of books where you'd want to run example code, and I'm increasingly ambivalent about the value of the printed book in this space, whereas I only read novels on paper.

johannes1234321 4y ago
Kindle is great for books I read front to back, but for jumping around in references experience is bad. For reading references I prefer HTML in a browser where I can have multiple tabs on multiple sections and where I can do "open this link in background so I can get back to it after finishing this paragraph" But many reference style books I tend to go for the physical book, where I can jump back and forth quickly. Combined with my brain which has a surprising quality in remembering where in a book something was said ...