{"id":369,"date":"2006-12-22T15:57:32","date_gmt":"2006-12-22T23:57:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/regarding-the-literature\/"},"modified":"2011-08-25T12:09:43","modified_gmt":"2011-08-25T19:09:43","slug":"regarding-the-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/regarding-the-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Regarding The Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I journeyed to the bookstore today in search of an O&#8217;Reilly pocket-sized Python reference, in an effort to tip the balance toward the positive in my newfound love\/hate relationship with the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.python.org\/\">Python programming language<\/a>. I found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oreilly.com\/catalog\/pythonpr3\/\">what I was after<\/a>, and on prominent display. I had not perused the computer book aisle in quite some time so I took a moment to look around. Every current and trendy computer language and development fad was well-represented, including a few of which I was previously unaware. That&#8217;s when it dawned on me how hard it is to find a simple book on the C programming language in these sections.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe C just isn&#8217;t good for selling books.<\/p>\n<p><center><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/eggs\/images\/Nuvola_mimetypes_bc.png\" alt=\"Stack of books\" \/><br \/>\n<\/center><\/p>\n<p>This episode reminded me of the difference I observed long ago about the differences in computer book selections at bookstores vs. academic libraries vs. public libraries. A bookstore will stock thick, vastly expensive tomes covering whatever the latest hot computing fad or language happens to be (wait for the fad to blow over and in 6 months the book will be less than $10 on the clearance table). Rewind 10 years to 1996 when Java was taking off in a big way. I think the local Barnes &#038; Noble shop had an entire section devoted to the language. And I seem to remember that every one of the books was essentially the same: A few chapters discussing the basics of the language, with the remaining 4\/5 of the book devoted to a verbatim reprint of the official Java language and API reference that was freely available online.<\/p>\n<p>An academic library, such as the one found at your local technical university, will stock a few of the fad books about specialized skills but will feature far more texts on fundamental and advanced computer science theory (think &#8220;general theory of fishing&#8221; vs. &#8220;learn bass fishing in 3 days!&#8221;). A community public library, in my experience, will have a decent mix of both types of books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I journeyed to the bookstore today in search of an O&#8217;Reilly pocket-sized Python reference, in an effort to tip the balance toward the positive in my newfound love\/hate relationship with the Python programming language. I found what I was after, and on prominent display. I had not perused the computer book aisle in quite some [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-python"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3543,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions\/3543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}