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The intro is well written and captivating, but is an intro. Unfortunately, it leaves me less wanting to read and experience the meat of the book and more curiou
by vegadw 1y ago
The intro is well written and captivating, but is an intro. Unfortunately, it leaves me less wanting to read and experience the meat of the book and more curious what that meat even is. With a target audience that doesn't know how to code already, where is it going? That's not generally a mystery I want in this kind of book. If I'm going to have something bubble up high enough on my to-read pile I'll ever get to it, I need to have some prior idea of whats in it.
- arbesman 1y agoGlad you enjoyed the intro! In terms of the meat, there’s only so much that can be provided in an introduction, but I did step through the chapters at the end, explaining a bit of what is to come (though obviously not the meat itself: that’s found in the chapters themselves!). But in terms of code itself, I do my best to convey how programming (and the world of code) feels. Admittedly, this is hard to do, but I talk about everything from different programming languages and what they are all about (and their vibes) to the unexpected power of global variables. There is also a ton of computing history to be found in the book, which I think is vital for understanding the tech world (and building whatever comes next). We often see a certain amount of historical ignorance in tech, and that feels like a recipe for missing context, or unnecessary reinvention, or just plain not understanding the path dependence of this world. So I really try to explore that a lot.
- albumen 1y ago"Show, don't tell". Why not post a bit of the meat, say chapters 2 and 3?
- arbesman 1y agoI want to give people a sense of the breadth of the book, hence the introduction (and I had thought that it might be too confusing, jumping into the middle of things...). But reasonable point.
- Upvoter33 1y agorather, why not also post one "content" chapter? I think it will help sell the book better, fwiw
- babblingfish 1y ago[flagged]
- manyaoman 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacopo_Ferretti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacopo_Ferretti
- shervinafshar 1y agoDitto about the quality of intro. One way to show that "meat" without sharing some arbitrary number of chapters could have been to also include some of the back matter of the book (index, bibliography, etc.) in the sample. For example, I'm reading this: > If coding really is like sorcery, what does this mean for how we think about computers? and wondering whether Abelson/Sussman sort of wizardry makes an appearance or not.
- etbebl 1y agoI will second and say that for me, when a book is about a topic I've thought about a fair bit already, I don't want to read it unless I'm convinced that the author has thought about it more deeply or from some different perspective than I have. And it's hard to tell that from an intro and table of contents.