Comments on: Book review: “Beautiful Code”, edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson

By: eliben

eliben — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 15:24:24 +0000

There’s citing sources and there’s citing sources. When these sources are absolutely essential to understand the contents of the chapter, I don’t see it as a particularly good way to implement the idea of this book. Otherwise, one could easily add a chapter:

“The amazing A* algorithm”. Go read paper XXX by Dijkstra for more information.

And that’s it.

While sources can be used in order to add extra information in such a book, they can’t be made essential. Some chapters in the book actually get this quite right - you can understand the chapter easily just by reading it, but if you want some more in-depth information there are sources to turn to.

And I don’t think the comparison to a scientific paper is relevant. This is not what the book was written for. It’s always important to keep the initial goal in sight when implementing something.

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:26:31 +0000

I have not read this book, though it is on my reading list. However, I am having trouble understanding your first criticism. Are you complaining that it cites outside sources? That is actually standard for “paper books”, in fact it is often seen as a necessity. And often the cited resources are not freely available on the Internet (though like ACM articles, they can usually be found at a library). Yes, that all makes it more difficult to follow up on a source, but I’m worried that our generation has become spoiled by online resources like the Wikipedia and blogs and have forgotten (if we ever knew) how to do real research.

And I know you are just looking for a book to read while waiting for the bus and not writing a thesis, but doesn’t the complaint that they cited sources instead of going in depth contradict your next complaint that some of the articles were too specific?