Head Rush Black Belt Secret Hacks of the [buzzword] Zen Masters!
March 30th, 2006
You can tell book publishers are feeling insecure because they’re trying to sell us insecurity. O’Reilly books used to be called “Learning This” and “Programming That”; now, we have “Missing Manuals” (what does the geek in the cubicle next to yours know that you don’t, and is it going to cost you your job????) and “Hacks” (caution: you must be wearing really cool sunglasses in order to appreciate this book). And the frequency of extreme sports anecdotes just goes up and up and up (I must be cool, because I kayak—buy this book, you worthless worm, and maybe some of it will rub off on you).
Who do I talk to about this? Who do I write, call, email, or message to say, “It isn’t working”?
*sigh*
“wtf?” said anonymous. JTS more like! Years ago, I learnt Perl from the “llama book” which proved to be indispensible, although I guess you need the humour to deal with the trials of writing and maintaining Perl code, and even then it does start to grate after a while. Perhaps I wouldn’t be so sceptical about O’Reilly’s catalogue if they had a more compelling selection (remembering a discussion about Ruby vs. Python book sales growth), but just taking a look at the bestsellers list on O’Reilly’s site pretty much maps out where they’ve been heading.
NB: JTS == http://www.jumptheshark.com/