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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.programmer,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Python (was Re: I did not inhale)
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2024 11:15:51 +0200
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On 21/08/2024 09:27, Muttley@dastardlyhq.com wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Aug 2024 20:56:00 -0000 (UTC)
> kalevi@kolttonen.fi (Kalevi Kolttonen) boringly babbled:
>> In comp.unix.programmer David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:
>>> No, you do not need your particular favourite out of the thousand and
>>> one Linux programming books in order to program for Linux.  You do not
>>> need /any/ book in order to write useful and successful code for Linux.
>>> Of course you need /some/ reference - and in the days before the
>>> internet was so easily available and so full of information, I went
>>> through a lot of programming books.  Some were good, some less so, and
>>> some have become famous.  But none of them were /necessary/ in any way.
>>
>> Well, I am a quite bad programmer but I am interested enough in the
>> Linux/UNIX workings so that reading the newest APUE and The Linux
>> Programming Interface did not feel painful or unnecessary at all. On
>> the contrary, it was a great pleasure to examine what kind of
>> programming facilities my favourite OS offers.
>>
>> Having these two books, or just one of them, is a great way to educate
>> oneself about Linux/UNIX. I see that The Linux Programming Interface
>> is available online as a free PDF, but I am not sure whether it is
>> a pirated version.
>>
>> There is no better way to learn Linux/UNIX workings than these two
>> books. Period.
> 
> The advantage of books written by professionals is that the code and
> explanations are usually much clearer and of better equality than the quickly
> knocked up might-work-might-not crap you often find on stack overflow and
> similar sites. Thats not to say good example code isn't out there but wading
> through the rubbish can be a tedious business and IME its often quicker just
> to reach for APUE or similar.
> 

"Usually" suggests you have statistics to back that up.

The reality is that there are endless numbers of crap books with poor 
explanations, buggy examples, and outdated information - as well as 
their being books that are high quality, accurate, and keep enough 
generality to be relevant for many years.  Equally, there are lots of 
posts on stack overflow and other such sites with top-quality code just 
as there are posts with complete nonsense, or (worse) subtly wrong code 
and answers.

The medium, or the price of getting the information, is at most only in 
vague correlation with the quality of the information.