Attention publishers!

[elfs]

When I buy a book like Apache Modules and discover that it's 562 pages long, I expect a little bit of padding. Everyone does it. Unnecessarily long outtakes of source code showing you every field in a structure, even the ones we won't use, even when 90% of that struct we won't use, are kinda normal for this industry.

What is not normal is for the book to end on page 357 and for the rest of the book to be a verbatim copy of RFC 2616, The HTTP Protocol. What does this have to do with writing Apache Modules? It's a little bit like including a chapter on knife sharpening in a cookbook. In fact, that would be more useful: it might be eight pages long rather than 30% of the page count!

Comments

[dossy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, one of the big criticisms of AOLserver is its lack of documentation. But, then I point to some of the Apache documentation and say, "If I could convince a publisher to just let me reprint the AOLserver source and an HTTP RFC and call it "a book" ... well, how valuable would that really be?

I really want to write a good book on AOLserver, but I'm not disciplined enough as a writer to produce a manuscript. Sigh.

I wish there were someone who was as into AOLserver as I am who was a writer, who could help.

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

typo in the url. s/hef/href/

[elfs.livejournal.com]

And it's fixed. Thanks!

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Hehe. Yeah. I've seen that before.

But I don't know about "everyone" doing it. O'Reilly doesn't.

[lovingboth]

My 'favourite' was a book about graphics for games a few years ago. It included the source code for some demo, including the data for the objects being spun around or whatever.

Fully one third of the book was this:

db 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0

(i.e. assembly code for eight bytes of data, all zero!)

This was prior to most people having internet access, but the code was on an included disc: no-one was going to type it in and depending on the assembler, there were much better ways of doing it (even using 'dw' would have halved the length!)