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"Learn X the Easy Way" goes back decades, especially in foreign language books. "Learn Python the Hard Way" was deliberately inverting that pattern.

I think Zed riffed on the "Learn X the easy way" pattern that I imagine has existed almost as long as books have.

Probably. His "Learn Python the Hard Way" was early and influential.

This had a huge influence on me. I still have projects running on web.py that stemmed from it.

It's also fairly controversial within the Python dev community. I read this title as a jab at that one, because it's not recommended to follow a lot of the "Hard Way" patterns and practices. It's been quite a few years since I was working in Python exclusively, so I can't recall specifics to point out.

> It's also fairly controversial within the Python dev community.

I can't speak to the Python book, but his Unix and SQL books are fantastic.

He was very hostile towards python 3 for very bad reasons.

Telling beginners as late as 2017 that "python3 is such a failure it will kill python".

That's not controversial, that's just wrong, especially but not only in hindsight.

I will forever remember what I consider the best marketing tagline in history for selling a coding book "Programming motherfucker, do you speak it?"