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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: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Sunday January 21 2018, @09:57PM (10 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 21 2018, @09:57PM (#625830) Journal

    content is written by the beautiful people at Stack Overflow

    That's been a really helpful resource, where the best (or at least better) answers rise to the top. When you see someone taking Stack Overflow or other free content and editing it into a book, website, etc., you have to wonder whether the quality of the editing is closer to stellar- or sewage-level (because either is possible, and everything in between).

    This... 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.

    Three sentences quoted from the books, yielding two comma splices* and "whom" shoehorned into a place where "who" belongs*, stilted wording aside. Average of one editing mistake per sentence.

    So, not stellar-level. If the above is an indication of the editing quality--and I hope it isn't--then the editing is about on the level of something you'd scrape off the bottom of your shoe while holding your nose and making a face.

    I have trouble sometimes trying to understand how someone with programming as a skill, who can tell you, for example, every nuance of difference between y=x++ and y=++x with disdain, but who can't even grasp, much less recite or follow simple rules of grammar.

    ------
    * Two sentences may be joined by a semicolon or a comma plus a conjunction and retain lexical sense. Two sentences can't be just stuck together with a comma because neither is a clause dependent upon the other. "Who" is subjective, while "whom" is objective. "Who contributed" is fine, "contributed by whom" is fine, but "whom contributed" is a syntax error. The rules aren't trivial, and are often dependent on sometimes arbitrary style choices, but being able to at least operate them is kind of a prerequisite to editing a book. Otherwise you've just edited some nice word salad, which can also be helpful, but don't go believing you're the editor of a book.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:30PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:30PM (#625842)

    I know a lot of programmers who are dyslexic. The areas of the brain responsible for programming are not necessarily the same as the ones that deal with spoken and written languages and their peculiarities. Grammar rules are often arbitrary and illogical.

    • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:41PM

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:41PM (#625849) Journal

      The areas of the brain responsible for programming are not necessarily the same

      No, of course not, but there's overlap between the disciplines with things like "what function does this reserved word serve" and "what style or syntax is needed here to convey the following instruction." This overlap is why, from assembler on up, programming languages are, almost without exception, metaphors for written communicative language.

      Grammar rules are often arbitrary and illogical.

      This statement describes programming languages in the same way as written ones.

      Programmers transitioning Perl <—> Php, for example, might notice such a thing.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:54PM (3 children)

      by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:54PM (#625853) Homepage

      I think you're full of shit. I've worked with a lot of dyslexic people. They understand language and rules just fine, maybe even better than you do, the worst you're gonna get from them is a pair of transposed numbers during manual data entry, whoop-de-goddamn do, you've never done that before?

      The real travesty is that they're treated like retards in grade school.

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by requerdanos on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:47PM (1 child)

        by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:47PM (#625880) Journal

        This is the second of your posts that I have been tempted to mod up--not down, up--today. You feeling okay?

        • (Score: 2) by VanessaE on Monday January 22 2018, @02:56AM

          by VanessaE (3396) <vanessa.e.dannenberg@gmail.com> on Monday January 22 2018, @02:56AM (#625929) Journal

          I don't get it.... no racial epithets, no minority references, genuinely insightful content. Gotta be the first time I've ever modded-up something E-F wrote.

          Are we in the mirror universe or something?

      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:58PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:58PM (#625885)

        Hit a nerve huh?

    • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:52PM (2 children)

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday January 21 2018, @11:52PM (#625883) Journal

      In fact, "Two statements may be joined by a semicolon, but not a comma" literally applies equally to English and to programming contexts such as C, SQL, and PHP... It is also one of the most "not that hard" things that could possibly apply here.

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by jb on Monday January 22 2018, @02:31AM (1 child)

        by jb (338) on Monday January 22 2018, @02:31AM (#625921)

        In fact, "Two statements may be joined by a semicolon, but not a comma" literally applies equally to English and to programming contexts such as C, SQL, and PHP...

        Not quite. At least in C it is perfectly legal to join two statements with a comma. This is most commonly seen when initialising a loop, as in:

                for (i = 0, j = 0; i < k - j; i++)
                    a[i] = foo(i, &j);

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @02:46PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @02:46PM (#626077)

          At least in C it is perfectly legal to join two statements with a comma.

          No, it isn't. It is legal (in contexts where the comma isn't interpreted as argument separator) to join expressions with a comma, forming another expression. Now in C, a statement may (and often does) consist only of an expression, but not all statements are of that form. For example, the following is a valid sequence of two statements:

          a += b;
          if (a > 10) do_something();

          If it were legal to join statements with a comma, then the following would be legal code, too:

          a += b, if (a > 10) do_something();

          Your compiler will tell you otherwise.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @07:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @07:29AM (#625981)

    who can tell you, for example, every nuance of difference between y=x++ and y=++x with disdain, but who can't even grasp, much less recite or follow simple rules of grammar.

    The problem is not with grammar. The problem is between the brain and the keyboard - fingers and eyes. How often do you type something and then after re-reading it you notice you typed something completely different simply because you corrected your sentence a few times?

    You can find the same problems even literature. There is a reason why editors exist and why proofreading is mandatory before submission.