5 ms·

No One on HackerNews knows him, that means it is only the few Indians who were fooled... and I am an Indian who was not fooled..

by machbio 14y ago

James_Duval 14y ago
I didn't know of him, but I was certainly fooled by Herbert Schildt when I started getting into programming... Schildt plays the same game, just on a subtler, smaller, more unassuming level.
- suhair 14y ago
  care to explain what is wrong with Herbert Schildt?
  - defrost 14y ago
    On the back of writing some fairly solid workaday code in C that was very MS-DOS specific and publishing several books about it he had the unmitigated gall to dare write an annotated guide to The C Language Standard in which he got a fair bit of detail about C the language of the C Virtual machine wrong. The first level of being a C Guru is an intimate understanding of Your C Compiler on Your OS using Your Hardware. The second level is the self realisation that everything you thought you knew was wrong. Poor old Herb positioned himself as an expert, wrote a book on that basis, angered the Gods who counter attacked with an annotated guide to what he got wrong and rubbed salt in by coining the term Bull Schildt. Frankly he did a service by taking a bullet like that as there now exists a kind of Platonic dialogue in which you can read the C Standard, read what someone thought it meant, and then read a commentary on that. Those C chaps can be a prickly bunch :/
    - James_Duval 14y ago
      To be fair, if you get something wrong in C, your computer might catch fire (not really, but you see my point. C will let you do a lot of things that you maybe shouldn't be doing, and getting something wrong can have more consequences than it does in many other languages. Accuracy is very important.)
    - sc0rb 14y ago
      He does write pretty comprehensive Java books though.
  - EliRivers 14y ago
    His C++ books became canonical examples of books not to read if you wanted to learn C++.
cmpitg 14y ago
... and a bunch of students that study in Singapore's SMU were fooled too[1]. It's not hard to find information and people's outrage about this crappy guy. I heard of him via one of my students who studied in SMU and have been waiting for the day someone unmasks him. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankit_Fadia#Career http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankit_Fadia#Career
manojlds 14y ago
There have been some discussions about him here before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4316574 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4316574 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4536439 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4536439

No One on HackerNews knows him, that means it is only the few Indians who were fooled... and I am an Indian who was not fooled..

by machbio 14y ago

No One on HackerNews knows him, that means it is only the few Indians who were fooled... and I am an Indian who was not fooled..

James_Duval 14y ago

I didn't know of him, but I was certainly fooled by Herbert Schildt when I started getting into programming... Schildt plays the same game, just on a subtler, smaller, more unassuming level.

suhair 14y ago
care to explain what is wrong with Herbert Schildt?
- defrost 14y ago
  On the back of writing some fairly solid workaday code in C that was very MS-DOS specific and publishing several books about it he had the unmitigated gall to dare write an annotated guide to The C Language Standard in which he got a fair bit of detail about C the language of the C Virtual machine wrong. The first level of being a C Guru is an intimate understanding of Your C Compiler on Your OS using Your Hardware. The second level is the self realisation that everything you thought you knew was wrong. Poor old Herb positioned himself as an expert, wrote a book on that basis, angered the Gods who counter attacked with an annotated guide to what he got wrong and rubbed salt in by coining the term Bull Schildt. Frankly he did a service by taking a bullet like that as there now exists a kind of Platonic dialogue in which you can read the C Standard, read what someone thought it meant, and then read a commentary on that. Those C chaps can be a prickly bunch :/
  - James_Duval 14y ago
    To be fair, if you get something wrong in C, your computer might catch fire (not really, but you see my point. C will let you do a lot of things that you maybe shouldn't be doing, and getting something wrong can have more consequences than it does in many other languages. Accuracy is very important.)
  - sc0rb 14y ago
    He does write pretty comprehensive Java books though.
- EliRivers 14y ago
  His C++ books became canonical examples of books not to read if you wanted to learn C++.

cmpitg 14y ago

... and a bunch of students that study in Singapore's SMU were fooled too[1]. It's not hard to find information and people's outrage about this crappy guy. I heard of him via one of my students who studied in SMU and have been waiting for the day someone unmasks him. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankit_Fadia#Career http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankit_Fadia#Career

manojlds 14y ago

There have been some discussions about him here before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4316574 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4316574 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4536439 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4536439