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djberg96 (2603)

djberg96
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Journal of djberg96 (2603)

Wednesday June 30, 2004
05:40 PM

Bad examples

[ #19609 ]
If there's one thing that drives me FUCKING INSANE, it's bad code examples in programming books. It's especially bad when it's the FIRST example.

I swear I was put off C++ for life because of a bug in the first example of a C++ book, by Grady Booch in its 2nd edition!.

Today we can chalk up Writing CGI Applications with Perl into the same category. Note to fuckheads - you forgot the <html> tag.

Yeah, there's probably errata online somewhere, but by the time I think to look for it, I'm already pissed off and steaming mad, thinking that *I'm* the one who's doing something wrong.


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  • I sometimes regret working for a publisher only because it would be ethically wrong for me to review potentially competing books. However, last night I read a book which not only used # characters to delimit comments in a C program (with a .cpp extension, no less), but it claimed that that's the proper comment marker for C programs.

    No lie.

  • Sometimes things slip by editors. I sure wouldn't tag my friends and esteemed members of the community Meltzer [perlguy.com] and Michalski [perl.com] as "fuckheads" [petdance.com].
    --

    --
    xoa

  • First of all, being called a "fuckhead" is pretty offensive, and uncalled for. Publishers don't always seem to publish what's given to them, and it isn't the fault of the author... especially for code I have found. Missing ; here, missing tag there. The erratta for WCAwP *is* online, and the motivated reader could find it in less time it takes them to call the authors "fuckheads".

    What chromatic found in the other book is a real error, what you are whining about is an editorial mistake. Learn the difference

    • It happens enough times in the other book (not yours!) that I'm willing to call releasing that book (not yours!) an editorial mistake. :)

  • Haahaa. Wow, I'd hate to have made a grammatical mistake!

    Next time I promise to be perfect, I mean, what more would anyone expect.

    Brent
    --
    Java? Yeah, I've heard of it. It's what I drink while hacking Perl.
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