As a semi-new programmer myself, I can't agree enough. OOP concepts like classes in Python were initially very foreign to me. The book I learned from gave no real world examples -- "Image the super class is a bird. Now we can subclass a canary! Clearly you can see how powerful classes are in Python!". I skipped the rest of the chapter because it seemed like something I would never need.
I would also like to gripe a bit about boring examples. One of the books I chose while starting out was Beginning Python.. My lord, what a travesty! "Think of a dictionary as a fridge." and "Now for this exercise, we're going to make an omelet!" my eyes would glaze over from boredom. It made it really fucking tough to be excited about the learning process when the assignment is making a digital egg.
I disagree on his book length point, as well. If done correctly (which I have found to be all to rare unfortunately) having a giant book filled with thorough explanations is a great value, in my opinion. By far, the best programming book I have ever read is Programming in C. It's pretty damn massive. Somewhere in the area of 600 pages at least. But I loved every bit of it! All of the end of chapter exercises were like little puzzles that needed to be solved using the newly acquired techniques. They were actually fun to do! and gave a great feeling of accomplishment once I finally figured out how to do them.
Way better than making some crappy pretend omelet!
One final gripe for you future book writers. I would love to see mid chapter exercises rather than one big end-of-chapter dump. Each new concept should be given time to be internalized -- or at least familiarized -- before moving onto the next thing.
I would also like to gripe a bit about boring examples. One of the books I chose while starting out was Beginning Python.. My lord, what a travesty! "Think of a dictionary as a fridge." and "Now for this exercise, we're going to make an omelet!" my eyes would glaze over from boredom. It made it really fucking tough to be excited about the learning process when the assignment is making a digital egg.
I disagree on his book length point, as well. If done correctly (which I have found to be all to rare unfortunately) having a giant book filled with thorough explanations is a great value, in my opinion. By far, the best programming book I have ever read is Programming in C. It's pretty damn massive. Somewhere in the area of 600 pages at least. But I loved every bit of it! All of the end of chapter exercises were like little puzzles that needed to be solved using the newly acquired techniques. They were actually fun to do! and gave a great feeling of accomplishment once I finally figured out how to do them.
Way better than making some crappy pretend omelet!
One final gripe for you future book writers. I would love to see mid chapter exercises rather than one big end-of-chapter dump. Each new concept should be given time to be internalized -- or at least familiarized -- before moving onto the next thing.