Stanislav Blinov wrote:
Here I agree that paper books beat any ebooks.
As for Russian translations - I don't like them since I've taken a look
at translated GoF book on design patterns. Translations are unbearable
far too often. Most of the time, people who translate such books are
either totally incompetent in CompSci, or know little to know aspects of
the particular area covered by the book. That leads to mistakes,
inconsistensies, errors. And often, the translation itself is hardly
readable compared to original. So I'd personally rather buy the book
from original publisher (therefore giving my monetary thanks to the
author) rather than pay additional sum for questionable work of
translators and local publishers.
In the last couple of my trips to conferences in Europe, I talked to developers
who were not native english speakers about this. They were unequivocal and
emphatic in wanting to do their programming in english. The thing is, the
programming community is global, covering about every country and language, and
english is what binds them all together. They're cut off if they are not
conversant in technical english, and as you said, are unhappy with second-rate
buggy translations.
This wasn't true 25 years ago, when localizing the programming tools was all the
rage.
I use google translator a lot. Sure, it often gives very bad translations, but
they are good enough that you can get what the author is saying.