On Wed, Jan 31, 2001 at 07:41:54PM +0000, Jonathan Stowe ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
>
> > Robin Szemeti [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth:
> > *>
> > *>no one ever said the buying public were intelligent ...
> >
> > Well, people rise to meet expectations too. There is precious little in
> > the way of good CGI books with a practical slant to them out there so out
> > of the lot of them, this is probably one of the best. The same principle
> > applies to Matt's famous archive...lots of people bitching and not much
> > else.
> >
>
> Hasnt the Castro book been around almost as long as Matt's Accursed
> Archive(tm) ? I think the thing about the both of them is that they both
> fill a particular niche that nobody higher up the food chain can
> particularly be both bothered to compete for. It's all just so, well, '96
> really :)
I wrote a very scathing review of Castro's book on amazon.com yesterday.
In case it doesn't get published, here's the gist:
For a technical book to be worth buying it needs to succeed on two fronts.
It needs to have accurate and useful information and it also needs to get
that information across in a manner that is understandable to its target
audience.
Castro's book obviously succeeds on the second front. Most of her
readers go away thinking they can write CGI scripts. This is why she
gets such good reader reviews. The problem with the book is that she
fails on the first count. Her Perl is appalling, but because her
audience are beginners they aren't qualified to cooment on this very
important part of the book.
Dave...
--
http://www.dave.org.uk | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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