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?"

A short list:

[Dancin_Santa]

Programming KDE
Programming Gnome
Perl 6, it's not your father's Perl
Ruby, for exceptionally tall people
Linux kernel, line by line
Programming C#
Programming for Mono
AtheOS, line by line
Embedded systems in C

And so on and so on.

Dancin Santa

Using OpenLDAP

[rapid prototype]

a nice Linux book which covers administering OpenLDAP [openldap.org] would be great. and please, dead tree, dead tree. when the server is down, you need a dead tree to read. when the server is up, you don't need a book.

-rp

Re:Yes, I want DEAD TREES!

[Snoopyh42]

Personally, I rather like reading books on my Palm Pilot. It's much smaller, I can hold 5-10 books at a time, and I never lose my place.

Sounds like this...

[ragnar]

The Java Cookbook [oreilly.com] sounds like what you are looking for. I own it and really enjoy it.

Here ya' go

[devphil]

Essential C++ by Herb Sutter.

The comp.lang.c++.moderated newsgroup ran a series of problems from the moderately thoughtful to the downright fugly, entitled "Guru of the Week" and contributed to by the best of the online C++ community. About 50 of the GotW article were then pulled into a book and published.

For C++ in general, get everything (right now, about 8 books) from the new "C++ In-Depth" series. Stroustrup is the series editor; Essential is one of the titles. The idea behind the series is to get away from the massive 1200-page MFC tomes meant solely to generate revenue for the publisher; all books in the In-Depth series must be less than 300 pages long (main body). Short, clear, and to the point.

Re:regardless of what the subject ...

[techstar25]

I've always wondered why college textbook publishers use ring bindings for their programming textbooks, but regular publishers make their programming books the normal way? Who reads the book, then closes it, then sits down to the keyboard? The point of putting sample code in a book is so that it can be copied but the reader(who is sitting at the keyboard, with both hands on). ALthough from the publishers standpoint, a ring binded book doesn't give them a chance to put a flashy name and logo on the binding. This would make it hard for people to find it on the shelf at the bookstore.

Re:regardless of what the subject ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with most things other than "Perfect" binding is that they either don't have real spines (spiral bound) or they have angled covers (ring binders). The best I've seen is "Lay Flat" binding.

http://letters.oreilly.com/layflat_0600.html

It's more expensive, but it makes very nice manuals.

Linux for Windows Administrators (already exists)

[WorkingHome]

Sybex already has a book that covers Linux written for Win Admins. It's 'Linux for Windows NT/2000 Administrators', ISBN 0-7821-2730-4.

It's very well reviewed at Amazon.

-C

Re:THINNER books

[jallen02]

DISCLAIMER: I am finishing up a book on PHP 4.1, I might be biased.

Consider this. The book is aimed at the beggining programmer to the intermediate programmer looking to learn a few good tricks and have a decent reference, yet not a complete reference. Just enough to jog your memory so the book is more of a practical guide and tutorial.

Most non-hardcore geeks/programmers don't like it as sharp and concise as K&R "The C Programming Langauge". Yet as you say, you don't like a 1200 page behemoth either. The trick is finding a medium balance where you can teach the subject material and basic concepts of programming while covering your language specifics. You may think its easy to keep it concise... but there is SO much to cover. It's not easy. You have to appeal to a wide range of audiences and make your book sellable to more than the hardened programmer who can read code like documentation.

Believe me I tried to keep things short and sweet, but topics and considerations about my audience keep coming up that force explanations for this and that.

Tech books typically go from proposal to the shelves in such a short time its difficult to get the elegance of a "The C Programming Language".

I am being dragged from my desk so must cut this short ;).

Its easy to just go on and on about a topic. With such short book release cycles (to stay competitive) it can be tough to get elegance in a book, versus raw content that is still useful.

I hope this provides a little insight into the way things are.

Jeremy

Re:I think it's safe to say

[Zapman]

> How about a case study book?

Well, I know it's sun/solaris specific, but their Sun Blueprints line is rather nice. They're short, they go over some of the basics, and the break it down to 2 or 3 case studies using some of the top solutions for the given problem.

I have the one on Enterprise backup, and while it's not something that I'd give to someone who wanted to understand a specific product, it's great when you're doing product analysis.

In the line, there are "Datacenter Layout", "Enterprise Backup", "Boot disk layout", "Designing Enterprise Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0", etc etc.

Webpage: http://www.sun.com/blueprints/

Some sample chapters are online as well.

Re:Content Management

[scyta1e]

Yes!!! Content management is going to be THE thing in the next few years. Also maybe a book on "Creating Content Managemnt Systems in PHP" or something. More Ruby books are always good too.

Re:regardless of what the subject ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to a copy shop near a college campus and get your favorite book debound and three-hole punched. Costs $10.

Re:What book do I need?

[neodymium]

Hey, but there already are Eric Raymond's "Sex Tips for Geeks" [tuxedo.org]. Written by the uber-geek Eric S. Raymond himself... :)

Re:More Ruby books!

[Colonel Panic]

There are some excellent Ruby titles recently available:
"The Ruby Way" by Hal Fulton
"The Ruby Developer's Guide" by Micheal Neuman
...in addition to the two others already available.
But I suspect that you're right - there will be room for more Ruby titles that cover specfic areas, like dRuby.

Also, how about:
*Ruby for PDAs
*Creating Servlets with Ruby and Webrick
_OR_
*Web services with Ruby and Webrick

I also think the Parrot idea is good - about a year from now it should be starting to have an impact so a book on Parrot released around then should do well.

My Idea of A Tech Book

[malus]

if all books were structured the same way as Michael Kay's XSLT Programmer's Reference, 2nd Edition, I would be a happy man.

Wrox Press,
ISBN 1-861005-0607

Ring bound with flashy spines...oh la la...

[Squirrel Killer]

COMPUTE! used to publish tons of books that were ring bound and still managed to have colorful, meaningful spines. The cover went through the rings and around to both the front and back of the book, the pages were loose in the rings and the books lied perfectly flat for those coding sessions at my C-128. The rings had a significant gap between the top and bottom that allowed the title to show.

I don't know if their 5-6 rings at the top and bottom qualify as true "ring-bound" but their binding method was great. Long-lasting too, I still pull out COMPUTE!'s Guide to Adventures every so often, have coded the BASIC program "Tower of Doom" from it several times, and it's still one of the best looking computer books on my shelf. My guess is that that binding is far too expensive for most publishers to consider.

-sk

SICP

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [mit.edu], by Abelson and Sussman.

The full text is on-line in HTML format, so you can try it before you buy it. It doesn't have much on algorithms, but it's got plenty on abstraction and program structure and cool advanced topics such as how to write a language interpreter.

Dead Tree Books and CD examples

[Mojo Geek]

I want the examples in the dead tree books to be covered in a CDrom. I want to be able to cut and paste the code and modify it and use it for my own uses without typing it in from a book. But I can't get away from the advantages of a dead tree and I buy them all of the time.

As far as next year....a long time out... the only thing I can think of that I'll be looking at soon is Mono and C#. C# is I'm sure already covered.
And Mono is just becoming something to "cover".

Another thing. I want books I can scan through and learn enough to walk into the interview and get the contract, but has enough depth I can use it later as a reference to complete the contract. The "animal people" give me that.

Re:I want hemp books!

[Wraithlyn]

Why is this modded as Funny? Should be insightful. Hemp was primarily villified and made illegal by an industrial conpiracy to protect monopolistic oil and wood interests.

"Hemp is the standard fiber of the world. It has great tensile strength and durability...and can be used to produce 25,000 products, ranging from dynamite to Cellophane.

"The natural materials in Hemp make it an economical source of pulp for any grade of paper manufactured, and the high percentage of alpha cellulose promises an unlimited supply of raw material for the thousands of cellulose (plastic) products our chemists have developed.

"All of these products, now imported, can be produced from home-grown Hemp. Fish nets, bow strings, canvas, strong rope, overalls, damask tablecloths, fine linen garments, towels, bed linen and thousands of other everyday items can be grown on American farms...all of this income can be made available to Americans."

"The paper industry offers even greater possibilities. As an industry, it amounts to over $1,000,000,000 a year, and of that, eighty percent is imported. But Hemp will produce every grade of paper, and government figures estimate that 10,000 acres devoted to Hemp will produce as much paper as 40,000 acres of average (timber) pulp land."

- Popular Mechanics, February 1938
(Taken from here [sumeria.net])

Hemp can be used to replace wood pulp paper, and we're cutting down our planet's forests at a suicidal rate. Hemp can be used as a domestically produced, renewable fuel, and yet we fight wars over foreign oil and pollute the atmosphere with it.

Re:VHDL

[human1]

VHDL for Programmable Logic by Kevin Skahill is an oldie but goodie (ISBN 0201895730).
Peter Ashenden's The Designer's Guild to VHDL 2nd Edition (ISBN 1558606742) is also good...
Smiths... HDL Chip Design (ISBN 0965193438)is a good VHDL/Verilog language reference but many of the examples are not synthesizable...

use your IEEE discount! I think all of the books are available through http://shop.ieee.org [ieee.org]