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Technical books are overpriced? The print edition of our book — Third-party JavaScript — sells for $45 (during a promotion it can frequently be had for much le

Technical books are overpriced? The print edition of our book — Third-party JavaScript — sells for $45 (during a promotion it can frequently be had for much less). Besides teaching you how to properly write third-party scripts, it guides you through some pretty nasty browser quirks and bugs – issues you might not have known even existed. If you were to encounter and debug these issues on your own, it could easily cost your firm hundreds – possibly even thousands – of dollars. At which point $45 (and the time to read the book) begins to look like a sound investment.

Swizec 15y ago
From the perspective of an organization, technical books are cheap. From the perspective of an autodidact, technical books are expensive. From the perspective of a student buying "textbooks", technical books are expensive as hell. Considering the existence of internet, google, stackoverflow and technical blogs, technical books are silly expensive, take too long to get to the point and are borderline useless.
- derleth 15y ago
  > technical books are silly expensive, take too long to get to the point and are borderline useless. Hey, don't tar the whole field with the sins of 99.9% of the elements. Some technical books (those by W. Richard Stevens, K&R, Knuth, and a few others) are wonderful resources.
  - ken 15y ago
    I mean no disrespect to Knuth, but he seems an odd choice to include in this list. Are you saying his books are exemplars of cheap, fast, or practical?
radagaisus 15y ago
This book looks amazing! I know this might be kind of counter to your whole comment but - I'm in the army (in Israel, we do 3 years and get 100$ a month) and I just can't afford to buy it. Is there any chance I can get a free slash really really discounted copy? It's exactly the book I'm looking for!
- bentlegen 15y ago
  It's not counter to my comment at all. Send me an email (ben at disqus) and I'll see what I can do.

Swizec 15y ago

From the perspective of an organization, technical books are cheap. From the perspective of an autodidact, technical books are expensive. From the perspective of a student buying "textbooks", technical books are expensive as hell. Considering the existence of internet, google, stackoverflow and technical blogs, technical books are silly expensive, take too long to get to the point and are borderline useless.

derleth 15y ago
> technical books are silly expensive, take too long to get to the point and are borderline useless. Hey, don't tar the whole field with the sins of 99.9% of the elements. Some technical books (those by W. Richard Stevens, K&R, Knuth, and a few others) are wonderful resources.
- ken 15y ago
  I mean no disrespect to Knuth, but he seems an odd choice to include in this list. Are you saying his books are exemplars of cheap, fast, or practical?

radagaisus 15y ago

This book looks amazing! I know this might be kind of counter to your whole comment but - I'm in the army (in Israel, we do 3 years and get 100$ a month) and I just can't afford to buy it. Is there any chance I can get a free slash really really discounted copy? It's exactly the book I'm looking for!

bentlegen 15y ago
It's not counter to my comment at all. Send me an email (ben at disqus) and I'll see what I can do.