One Good Thing from the World Cup: Free eBook

[NickFitz]

If this isn't something you're interested in then feel free to go back to the Daily Fail links, but I thought I'd let you all know that Sitepoint are giving away a free eBook, chosen by the World Cup results - but only until Monday evening.

They created a league table of books tied to teams, and offered increasing discounts on the books/teams that made it through. The winner is free until Monday night.

It's some book about JQuery, so if you couldn't give a stuff about that, what the hell - it's free

It's also "Free as in give me an email address for the download link." Still, it's not exactly hard to get a Y! or Hotmail account you can forget about after reading one email.

FWIW, JQuery has many flaws, and its creator and controller is more likely to reject criticism of it as a personal insult than acknowledge it as a valid contribution to improving the library. Nonetheless, no end of people are using it now, so if web development is what you do or is on your horizon, a free book (even though it has a pathetic title apparently designed to appeal to teenagers) can't be that bad.

For more information on the deep and far-reaching flaws in JQuery, you can either do a search of the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.javascript, or get me started on it after a couple of pints

[OwlHoot]

I don't think I'll bother, as I already have about 10 ebooks on JQuery.

And no doubt this one will be on alt.binaries.e-book.technical in a week or two anyway.

(I sometimes feel a bit guilty about being so blasé about books, because I realize how long and hard the authors must work on each one.)

[NickFitz]

(I sometimes feel a bit guilty about being so blasé about books, because I realize how long and hard the authors must work on each one.)

They do. I know, because my father wrote a few books, and a number of friends and colleagues of mine have also done so.

Then again, I'm not sure that the authors (yep, it took two of them) of the book linked to above will necessarily be losing out: either Sitepoint, the publishers, will have sorted them out with a few bob, or the book wasn't selling anyway so they haven't lost anything, but will gain a bit of publicity.

Having had a quick skim of the book, it seems that the idea is to explain "How to be a Computer Programmer Without Having to Learn How to be One" to people from a web design background, who only know stuff like HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to address the fact that programming is a craft that takes a lot of time and effort and innate ability (a bit like woodcarving), and instead provides a few basic techniques that one can apply hither and yon without any understanding of what to do when things go wrong. Joel Spolsky's Law of Leaky Abstractions seems relevant (though it always is relevant to any JS library).

In other words, the book might be able to teach you how to carve a wooden sausage or even a wooden armadillo; but when you try to carve a wooden heron, and the beak breaks off because you don't know how to handle wood when it gets that thin, it has nothing to offer.

Still, it's free, and you get what you pay for