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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday January 21 2018, @01:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the free-stuff dept.

Here is an excellent collection of 45 free books in PDF format which I found here — "Programming Notes for Professionals" books.

The PDFs contain this on one of their very first pages:

Please feel free to share this PDF with anyone for free

This ${insert title here} Notes for Professionals book is compiled from Stack
Overflow Documentation, the content is written by the beautiful people at Stack
Overflow. Text content is released under Creative Commons BY-SA, see credits at
the end of this book whom contributed to the various chapters. Images may be
copyright of their respective owners unless otherwise specified.

Because of the range of software development related topics covered, I thought this might be of interest to a large fraction of people on SN.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @06:41PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @06:41PM (#625736)

    Whenever I search for any programming documentation, I find two kinds of results:

    [1] Actual documentation from actual reference manuals.
    [2] Idiots on Stack Overflow who ask stupid questions about shitty code and get stupid answers which ultimately link to the actual documentation.

    Now why the fuck would I ever want to wade through shit to find the same information I could find by simply reading the goddamned reference manuals in the first place?

    The sooner Stack Overflow ceases to exist, the better.

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @06:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @06:53PM (#625738)

    -site:stackoverflow.com

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by tibman on Sunday January 21 2018, @07:35PM (1 child)

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 21 2018, @07:35PM (#625753)

    A lot of "manuals" are terrible. Most of MSDN is terrible. W3C, PHP.net, and MDN are good for web technologies. If you are doing some microsoft stack stuff then you already know the official documentation is really bottom barrel trash. Older and more established languages have the benefit of a lot of time to distill developer knowledge into something readable. For those languages most people own dead-tree manuals that are a decade old and still "up to date" : P

    I like stack overflow for the really esoteric stuff. Edge cases and technology quirks are rarely documented. Saved my bacon a few times.

    --
    SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday January 21 2018, @08:58PM

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Sunday January 21 2018, @08:58PM (#625799) Journal

      I find Stack Overflow useful. They have perhaps done too much SEO, drowning out other resources, but other than that, I like it.

      I agree that there are plenty of bad manuals. Lots of bad programming textbooks too. And, yeah, MSDN is one of the worst. Some of their "documentation" is totally content free sales points that were probably written by non-technical marketing drones. What is package X? X is a very powerful package that "sparks the imagination" and "increases your productivity" and "reduces errors"! It's Easy To Learn, and you will love it!

      I could use more cheat sheets. Upon coming back to a language I haven't used in a while, I need memory joggers. Also, could do with more examples showing how to use new features. Like, in C++, I'm still more familiar with string.h and stdio.h than Standard Template Library strings and iostream. I'd heard for years that stdio had better performance than iostream, so didn't bother much with the latter. Never knew, until recently, it was because the default is to make iostream backward compatible with stdio, and if that backward compatibility is disabled, then iostream's performance is on par with stdio.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @08:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @08:07PM (#625770)

    perhaps to encounter the brilliance of other people? never mind the current prejudice, which, if luck is with you, you'll survive. with less brain devoted to prejudice, there's more available to learn and discover. give that a try when you're not in the grip of some emo reaction!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @08:46PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @08:46PM (#625794)

    I know. It allows commies and other poor people to educate themselves and to take away jobs from decent Americans.

    • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:48PM (1 child)

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:48PM (#625851) Homepage

      I know that you are being facetious, but the truth is that even with the connectivity of the internet and the relative low barrier of entry, people are still too lazy to learn on their own. Well, sometimes people can make it work for themselves, but unless you're the best of the best or have otherwise carved out a nice niche for yourself, larger corporations require a piece of paper. Even the cafeteria workers are H1-B employees nowadays.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @11:09AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @11:09AM (#626026)

        I know that you are being facetious, but the truth is that even with the connectivity of the internet and the relative low barrier of entry, people are still too lazy to learn on their own.

        Much of this likely has to do with the propaganda that you can't do anything without schooling, and that you can only be an intellectual if you have a degree. Why would they put much stock into self-education if they barely believe it's possible?

        Lack of motivation is a big factor as well, but schooling isn't going to fix that; such people will always be mediocre, or even worse.

        people are still too lazy to learn on their own.

        Then those people won't ever learn anything, because learning is something you do yourself. A teacher can try to guide you in the right direction, but if you're not willing to learn, then it's all for nothing.

        These corporations requiring pieces of paper are going to pass up perfectly good autodidacts who don't have degrees and get uneducated trash who have degrees but can't even right FizzBuzz programs. So it goes. You don't have to be able to think in the long-term to get rich, despite the fallacious logic used by some.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:06PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:06PM (#625833) Journal

    Now why the fuck would I ever want to wade through shit to find the same information I could find by simply reading the goddamned reference manuals in the first place?

    Not sure the question isn't intended to be rhetorical, but here goes.

    Because often the information in a reference manual is just that: A reference for someone who already knows something, but wants to clear up points of syntax, usage, or whatever.

    The light, helpful material that you "Wade Through" is written on a level that is much more tutorial in nature, easier to grasp for someone who doesn't already intimately know something, and furthers knowledge.

    The difference is approximately comparable to a tutorial on a command vs. its man page: The tutorial is less complete and more comprehensible and useful, while the man page is densely more complete, and comprehensible, and frequently less useful.

    Sometimes you need the dense reference information. And sometimes you need the practical, useful information.

    Really, a friendly tutorial is something you "breeze" through. Dense reference materials are what you "wade" through.