5 ms·

Bring back the 90's antipattern of making the book so thick you use it as a monitor stand.

by ralphc 3y ago

abhgh 3y ago
I got this [1] a few years ago deluding myself into believing that I'll learn a bit from it everyday. Alas, the only way it's useful to me on a daily basis now is as a monitor stand. I remain cautiously hopeful that I'll begin pecking at it someday. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timothy-Gowers/dp/0691118809/ https://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timot...
brianmcc 3y ago
"Teach yourself J2EE in 21 days, 2nd edition" remains marvellous for this :-D
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  Mine (archived by still in possession) are FreeBSD 6.0 Unleashed and some compendium of Computer Science articles from ACM circa 2004. >FreeBSD is extremely robust and powers some of the largest internet sites in world including Yahoo!. FreeBSD 6 Unleashed provides complete coverage of everything you need to know to use FreeBSD to its full potential, including coverage of FreeBSD 6.0. This edition includes updated coverage of Apache, MySQL and Sendmail, as well as added coverage of PowerPC support for Macintosh G3 and G4 platforms. This is the most up to date, comprehensive reference on the market covering FreeBSD 6.0.
- tmtvl 3y ago
  My copy of 'Programming Perl' is the thickest book on my shelves, narrowly beating out 'The Peloponnesian War' (though the latter is taller, so it's hard to say which is the longer read).
  - cafard 3y ago
    Inside SQL Server 2008 T-SQL Programming is somewhat thicker. In fact, it is about the size of Programming Perl and Modern Perl together--though I must add that Programming Perl lost its front cover a while ago.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
I don't think I'd call that an antipattern, tbh. Lots of things did this - I remember our CIO bought us all fancy IDE thingies back in the early J2EE days; I forget what it was, JBuilder, maybe? Everyone was using Eclipse (or us greybeards sticking to our emacs and ((neo)v)im, by then so we ALL used them as monitor stands.
- calibas 3y ago
  I think copying fifteen pages of code by hand, then going back through everything to find the typos you made, is the anti-pattern.
potta_coffee 3y ago
My monitor stand is all out-of-date technical books!

Bring back the 90's antipattern of making the book so thick you use it as a monitor stand.

by ralphc 3y ago

Bring back the 90's antipattern of making the book so thick you use it as a monitor stand.

I got this [1] a few years ago deluding myself into believing that I'll learn a bit from it everyday. Alas, the only way it's useful to me on a daily basis now is as a monitor stand. I remain cautiously hopeful that I'll begin pecking at it someday. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timothy-Gowers/dp/0691118809/ https://www.amazon.com/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timot...

brianmcc 3y ago

"Teach yourself J2EE in 21 days, 2nd edition" remains marvellous for this :-D

unethical_ban 3y ago
Mine (archived by still in possession) are FreeBSD 6.0 Unleashed and some compendium of Computer Science articles from ACM circa 2004. >FreeBSD is extremely robust and powers some of the largest internet sites in world including Yahoo!. FreeBSD 6 Unleashed provides complete coverage of everything you need to know to use FreeBSD to its full potential, including coverage of FreeBSD 6.0. This edition includes updated coverage of Apache, MySQL and Sendmail, as well as added coverage of PowerPC support for Macintosh G3 and G4 platforms. This is the most up to date, comprehensive reference on the market covering FreeBSD 6.0.
tmtvl 3y ago
My copy of 'Programming Perl' is the thickest book on my shelves, narrowly beating out 'The Peloponnesian War' (though the latter is taller, so it's hard to say which is the longer read).
- cafard 3y ago
  Inside SQL Server 2008 T-SQL Programming is somewhat thicker. In fact, it is about the size of Programming Perl and Modern Perl together--though I must add that Programming Perl lost its front cover a while ago.

michaelcampbell 3y ago

I don't think I'd call that an antipattern, tbh. Lots of things did this - I remember our CIO bought us all fancy IDE thingies back in the early J2EE days; I forget what it was, JBuilder, maybe? Everyone was using Eclipse (or us greybeards sticking to our emacs and ((neo)v)im, by then so we ALL used them as monitor stands.

calibas 3y ago
I think copying fifteen pages of code by hand, then going back through everything to find the typos you made, is the anti-pattern.

potta_coffee 3y ago

My monitor stand is all out-of-date technical books!