One question
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Hi everyone, I have a question in fact it was always question for me how some people can write books for example instruction programming or advanced titles at a subject but some people cant write and they read books of other people do they have important references?maybe someone says that they work very hard but even for hard work needs to a start point and information about that object. What do you think ?
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Hi everyone, I have a question in fact it was always question for me how some people can write books for example instruction programming or advanced titles at a subject but some people cant write and they read books of other people do they have important references?maybe someone says that they work very hard but even for hard work needs to a start point and information about that object. What do you think ?
The old saying about writing regardless of subject matter is, "Write what you know." As for myself, I don't know much of anything, so I just try to have a good time. :) For technical books, however, many authors start with the documentation for the published APIs and then spend a lot of time writing code, learning what they don't tell you in the help files, finding workarounds for non-obvious problems, making note of inaccuracies, etc. They then take this information and put it into an organized format so that the rest of us can benefit from their effort and experimentation. In other words, many people are capable of doing all the technical research and experimentation that tech authors go through, so it's not necesary to buy books in order to learn a given technology. What you're paying for is time. The summarized knowledge that they present allows you to avoid wasting the same amount of time in trial and error that they went through.
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
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Hi everyone, I have a question in fact it was always question for me how some people can write books for example instruction programming or advanced titles at a subject but some people cant write and they read books of other people do they have important references?maybe someone says that they work very hard but even for hard work needs to a start point and information about that object. What do you think ?
Chris said it perfectly. The overwhelming majority of technical books do not teach anything you can't find or figure out for yourself. It's a simple question of time. To that point: I as an author spend several hundred hours investigating, experimenting and documenting what I find on a particular subject. I then write a book that costs in the neighborhood of $40-$50. While each individual may only find a small percentage of the book to be useful to their specific scenarios, spending $50 for the book saves them many hours of research they would have to spend. Therefore, the book is a much cheaper and much faster way of finding the same information the reader could obtain on their own.
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Chris said it perfectly. The overwhelming majority of technical books do not teach anything you can't find or figure out for yourself. It's a simple question of time. To that point: I as an author spend several hundred hours investigating, experimenting and documenting what I find on a particular subject. I then write a book that costs in the neighborhood of $40-$50. While each individual may only find a small percentage of the book to be useful to their specific scenarios, spending $50 for the book saves them many hours of research they would have to spend. Therefore, the book is a much cheaper and much faster way of finding the same information the reader could obtain on their own.
You heard it here first, folks. He's cheap. But he's not easy. :-D
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
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Hi everyone, I have a question in fact it was always question for me how some people can write books for example instruction programming or advanced titles at a subject but some people cant write and they read books of other people do they have important references?maybe someone says that they work very hard but even for hard work needs to a start point and information about that object. What do you think ?
The first .NET books, for example, would come from Microsofties who have access to internal documentation. People who write the first WPF books, for example, would use reflection and trial and error a lot, as well.
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ Metal Musings - Rex and my new metal blog "I am working on a project that will convert a FORTRAN code to corresponding C++ code.I am not aware of FORTRAN syntax" ( spotted in the C++/CLI forum )
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Hi everyone, I have a question in fact it was always question for me how some people can write books for example instruction programming or advanced titles at a subject but some people cant write and they read books of other people do they have important references?maybe someone says that they work very hard but even for hard work needs to a start point and information about that object. What do you think ?
messages wrote:
how some people can write books for example instruction programming or advanced titles at a subject but some people cant write and they read books of other people
- No matter how much you know, you will never know everything. This is one absolute I can assure you of.. err.. absolutely. ;) 2) We have a tech writing department to edit my white papers. Other than technical proposals, R&D technology achievement white papers, I don't write. The primary reason is this "hick kid" doesn't have a degree. :) I graduated high school with a less than preferred vocabulary and english grammar, and especially very poor spelling. However, if you want to learn how to achieve double precision and better depth buffers in OpenGL, hardware accelerated, using a 24bit depth buffer without dropping or compressing bits... :) I'm the guy to talk to. I wrote the first variable clip-plane solution to real-world rendering, and I have since replaced it with something better that the industry is still scrambling for. :rolleyes: Now add on massively parallel and lock free algorithm programming and I am definately an odd-ball for the marketplace. Writing is about content. The publisher can pay someone to fix the grammar and spelling, but if you don't have the content they don't have a book, so there is always the hunt for true content. There is often the hunt to turn the unpublished into published if they can find the right content.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)