Great New Book

[A.M. Kuchling]

On Sat, 30 Dec 2000 06:07:09 GMT, Greg Jorgensen <gregj at pobox.com> wrote:
>I don't know about books published in Italy, but here in America books in
>general, and technical books especially, are sold by weight rather than
>quality of the content. For years now Que, SAMS, Sybex, et al. have

Philip Greenspun's story about writing his book on databased-backed
Web sites, at http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html,
is relevant here, particularly the section titled "Why Computer Books
Suck".  It's notable that most of the really good books I've read
lately have been quite slim.  ("Into the Wild", "Extreme Programming
Explained", "Telling", "Ghost Children", "Magnificent Corpses"...)
This isn't to say that thick books are automatically bad, especially
when dealing with fiction, but for technical books thickness may
indicate that the author can't boil things down to their essence very
well.

--amk