Comments on: Rant #213, in which a 1200+ pages book is judged and dismissed by its table of contents http://rassie.org/archives/281 Barking at technology Wed, 28 Dec 2011 06:51:41 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 By: Kent Fredric http://rassie.org/archives/281/comment-page-1#comment-6143 Kent Fredric Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:16:20 +0000 http://rassie.org/?p=281#comment-6143 I have to agree, from the points you pick out, it looks like a shameful waste of the authors time to have published this book. They might be recommended to you know, actually learn Perl and that whole CPAN thing, participate in the community and so-forth before deciding to publish a book on the matter.Also, that YAPE::Regexp::Explain thing has been outdated since 5.10 came out. All the modern Regexp syntaxes are unsupported by it and just breaks the explainer horrifically. ( I reported this bug back in 2008: https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=41497 , no progress ).This book to me is probably on par with somebody releasing a book on Apache but only covering Apache 1, or somebody releasing a book on PHP, but only covering PHP4 ....Shocking really. I have to agree, from the points you pick out, it looks like a shameful waste of the authors time to have published this book. They might be recommended to you know, actually learn Perl and that whole CPAN thing, participate in the community and so-forth before deciding to publish a book on the matter.Also, that YAPE::Regexp::Explain thing has been outdated since 5.10 came out. All the modern Regexp syntaxes are unsupported by it and just breaks the explainer horrifically. ( I reported this bug back in 2008: https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=41497 , no progress ).This book to me is probably on par with somebody releasing a book on Apache but only covering Apache 1, or somebody releasing a book on PHP, but only covering PHP4 ….Shocking really.

]]> By: Wolfgang Kinkeldei http://rassie.org/archives/281/comment-page-1#comment-6077 Wolfgang Kinkeldei Fri, 02 Jul 2010 06:10:32 +0000 http://rassie.org/?p=281#comment-6077 Great Post, Nikolai! However, you forgot to mention that the freely available chapter also has typo errors. On page 221 a couple of backslash-characters are missing. So the reader is told that eg "s" is describing the space-character-class in a regular expression instead of "\s". Readers might be confused that their code would never work as expected. I agree that this chapter is a horror to read. Thanks for your comment, I will never buy this book, it does not seem to be worth the paper it is printed on. Great Post, Nikolai!

However, you forgot to mention that the freely available chapter also has typo errors. On page 221 a couple of backslash-characters are missing. So the reader is told that eg “s” is describing the space-character-class in a regular expression instead of “\s”. Readers might be confused that their code would never work as expected.

I agree that this chapter is a horror to read.

Thanks for your comment, I will never buy this book, it does not seem to be worth the paper it is printed on.

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