What Kind of Books do You Want?

ctrimble asks: "I'm the acquisitions editor for a technical publishing company (not the one with the animals, but we have had six of our books reviewed favourably, here on Slashdot) and part of my job is to determine what books my company should publish. This consists, mainly, of me sitting in my apartment eating peanut butter sandwiches, reading Slashdot, and writing perl scripts that generate titles in a Madlibs type fashion: "Hacking Ruby for Midgets" (forthcoming in July). Unfortunately, there's a bit of an impedance mismatch between my methodology and filling the needs of the programming community. Market research is tough to do in tech books since you need to forcast about a year in advance. So, let me pose the question to you -- what kind of books do you want? What spots do you see as needing to be filled? For that matter, do you even want dead-tree books, or are eBooks and/or online documentation sufficient?"

no...

[Phexro]

i'd be perfectly happy with 'hacking ruby for midgets'.

What book do I need?

[PoiBoy]

Speaking both for myself and many other Slashdot readers, I really need the book An Idiot's Guide to Getting Laid Tonight.

Moderators: That is a joke.

how-to books

[mr.ska]

I'd like a book on how to forecast the needs of the technology sector about a year in advance. ; )

Give me a dead tree book...

[flogger]

Some of my best research is done while I'm on the john. I can sit and relax and go through a reference manual without any interuptions. My wife won't let me take a computer into the bathroom to do research.

Re:What book do I need?

[unformed]

Moderators: That is a joke.

Right. For you it might just be a joke; What about the rest of us who would actually buy -and- use such a book?

I want to see:

[Chundra]

1. Teach yourself ANSI Common LISP in 24 hours.
2. The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Linux Kernel Internals.
3. Assembly language for Dummies
4. Giving yourself a Enterprise Java Enema.

How about a book on self study

[The Wookie]

called Teach Yourself Teaching Yourself In 21 Days In 21 Days

Re:books with lots of pron

[Chundra]

I can just imagine what a doubly linked list would look like. I'm afraid. Very, very afraid.

Lisp books needed!

[Jon Howard]

I'm a Lisp programmer (Allegro CL [franz.com] mostly), so naturally I would like to see more books covering Lisp. I'd specifically like to see the following topics covered:

• Network programming with Lisp for a wider variety of protocols
• Advanced tuning with foreign functions/mixed language programming
• Graphics and OpenGL programming with Lisp
• Sound programming with Lisp
• Game programming with Lisp
• Databases in Lisp

I'd really like to find more practical Lisp examples on bookstore shelves.

Oh, and before I hear "Lisp can't do that", here's a short list of Lisp success stories:

• Animation & Graphics [franz.com] (including Square USA and Naughty Dog Software)
• Artificial Intelligence [franz.com] (including Kurzweil and Microsoft Research)
• BioInformatics [franz.com] (including MDL Information Systems)
• B2B & E-Commerce [franz.com] (including ITA Software [powers Orbitz])
• Data Integ. & Mining [franz.com] (including Cadabra/GoTo Shopping)
• EDA/Semiconductor [franz.com] (including AMD and American Microsystems, Inc.)
• Expert Systems [franz.com] (including Univ. of Chicago Infolab and Signal Insurance)
• Finance [franz.com] (including Price Waterhouse Coopers and Cognition Corporation)
• Intelligent Agents [franz.com] (including Fujitsu Limited)
• Knowledge Mgmt [franz.com] (including Design Power, Inc.)
• Mechanical CAD [franz.com] (including Parametric Technologies Corp.)
• Modeling & Simulation [franz.com] (including Boeing and Johnson Engineering)
• Natural Lang. Proc. [franz.com] (including Sony CSL and Stanford University)
• Optimization [franz.com] (including NASA and Space Telescope Institute)
• Research [franz.com] (including Univ. of Southern California and University of Wyoming Applied AI Lab)
• Risk Analysis [franz.com] (including Arthur D. Little, Inc.)
• Scheduling [franz.com] (including Northwest Airlines and Ascent Technology, Inc.)
• Telecom [franz.com] (including France Telecom R&D and British Telecom Labs)
• Web Authoring [franz.com] (including The Performing Graphics Company and Schema GmbH)

I want hemp books!

[jordan_a]

Personally I'd like to have hemp paper books. Hemp paper is of exceptional quality and a tonne of hemp will make much more paper then a tonne of dead trees.

That and I'd love to see some idiot try to smoke a book.

Re:How about a book on self study

[b_pretender]

Better make it:

Teach Yourself Teaching Yourself In 21 Days in 22 Days

That way I can actually learn something.

let them eat documentation...

[digitalmuse]

well, like the rest of the folks here, or at least the noisy pleading ones, I prefer the DTE (Dead Tree Edition) of my techical references. I would much rather be able to pull a book off a shelf and pull it open to a dog-eared page ("thou shalt free the malloc's") then have to ensure that I have a suitable viewer installed on a secondary machine and then dig around for the chapter I'm looking for.
However, I'm sure that there are folks here on the other side of the coin who would rather have the electronic manual for easy access. Any Road Coders want to chime in here?

I must say that having contracted for the guys who have the zoophilia fetish, not everyone likes the covers. In the words of one stressed artist who was hunched over her screen and tablet trying to setup the clipping paths for one such book cover, "I don't care how friggin cute they are, I'm sick of these damn furry things. If you don't want me to lose my mind, you'll stick to lizards and fish from here on, all these bad-hair-day animals are seriously taxing my sanity"

I would also like to provide you with another possible book title, feel free to use it as you wish.
"Windows XP: for dummies"

Re:Well...

[SnapShot]

2. A book on why I suck at the Debian installs.

Reminds me. I'd like the "Step by step guide for GCC development under Linux for the Windows Programmer who has only ever used an integrated development environment and wouldn't know a command line if it came and bit him on the butt."

Chapters should include:

1. "Pick a shell and stick with it."
   
2. "VI and EMACS. What the fuck?"
   
3. "'Hello World' works, now what?"
   
4. "Make 'world' is not your friend."
   
5. "Just enough CVS to use it and then do something else."
   
6. "What's the PATH less traveled by?"
   

On a more serious note. It would be a book that is aimed at the intelligent windows programmer (we exist, we just need to be shown the True Way) that wants to use linux and contribute to the open source community.

The enclosed CD would have a complete distribution of debian or somehthing that is set up with the latest GCC and libraries. The publisher should work in tandem with a big Open Source project and have lots of real world examples of how one would use GCC, linux, CVS, make and at least one shell. Personally, I'd like it if it were targeted towards C++ (or C). Also, don't assume that we have anything more than a dial up connection.

Here you go

[Blue Lozenge]

Go fill in where these HOWTO's left off [google.com].

Problem with E-Books

[WNOHGB-Washu]

You cant really set E-books up on a shelf to give your co-workers the impression that you're a guru.

No no no - Dating with SQL

[cryptochrome]

SELECT first_name,phone_number FROM women WHERE easy='very' AND looks='good'

Spiral Bindings

[Dark Paladin]

I agree with this 100%. I realize that the price of the book will probably rise an extra 5-10% for this feature, but the ability to lay a book flat as you're typing/eating/making love to your (very) understanding wife is a huge feature in technical books.

Re:No no no - Dating with SQL

[NoMaster]

SELECT first_name,phone_number FROM women WHERE easy='very' AND looks='good'

Empty set (0.07 sec)

Re:No no no - Dating with SQL

[poot_rootbeer]

Yeah, that's the easy part... the difficult part is getting someone to grant you INSERT privileges!

Re:How about "Windows for Unix Admins"

[SiO2]

Elitist swine. Stop perpetuating an hierarchical order on users. Sure, some are more technically inclined than others. That's why we're here to help them. "My kernel's bigger than your kernel," or "My kernel's smaller and faster than yours," as the case may be, type of attitudes degrades us all. The IT/IS or whatever profession already has a fairly negative perception about it. Please, if you feel so inclined as to assert your "prowess," go buy some big-ass SUV or something.

Re:No no no - Dating with SQL

[Sycraft-fu]

I don't do SQL (I'm not a programmer), so I just wrote some pseudocode. Thanke for the correction :)

I want books that...

[Anonymous Coward]

I want books that will tell an educated ignoramus about the topic of the book.

I want computer books designed to let me fake my way through an interview on a certain topic. Errr. I want books that will let me evaluate a new technology / language that I have no experience with to see if I want to buy a big expensive book about it.

These books should be 60 - 120 pages long, of small format, and should cost $15. I want a good description of the design philosophy and target problems the tech / lang. addresses and a good intro.

I want to think to myself "Hmmm. I'm a little bit interested in
- C#
- Linux
- Database Architechture
- Some random thing
How about if I pick up the little bitty $8.99 book that I can read cover to cover in about 5 hours. Then I'll know if I should continue with some $40 - $70, 300 - 1200 page beast of a book that doesn't lend itself to light perusal."

If you could get a series of books like that going I think it would be rad. It would make it much easier to pick up csci stuff casually.