Steve Teale wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:
A chunky fragment of TDPL will hit Rough Cuts soon enough. I'm pondering
whether I should be adding exercises to the book. Some books have them,
some don't.
Pros: As I'm writing, I've come up with some pretty darn cool exercise
ideas.
Cons: The book gets larger, takes longer to write, and I never solved
the exercises in the books I've read, but then I'm just weird.
What do you think?
Thanks,
Andrei
Andrei,
Do you have a publisher yet? They will probably give you quite a definitive
answer. They usually have quite strong ideas about the market they are aiming
for.
The publisher, Addison-Wesley, is leaving such details to me.
If is is to be a university text book, then Yes!
I realize that doing it is a pain in the ass. You have to test every little
thing to the limit, which takes forever. But if you do it you will sort out
bugs in the book.
Don't envy you, especially given the moving target of D2 ;=)
But the best of luck.
Thanks! One nice thing is I've written (in D!) a little script that
extracts the code from all of my examples, compiles it, and runs it
comparing the output with the expected output. The book will definitely
have a number of faults, but code that doesn't work will not be one of them.
It's amazing how much I need to rewrite in wake of recent improvements
to D and Phobos. My initial draft of Chapter 1 used char[] for strings!
I think D couldn't have claimed being much more than a step forward from
C if it stayed with that approach to strings. There's still stuff that
doesn't compile (Walter is working on that), and looking forward I'm so
excited about the forgotten __traits(allMembers) and the reflection
capabilities it begets, I can't stand myself.
Andrei
