Hacker News Reader

Comment by rqtwteye | Hacker News Reader

That's something I have noticed with a lot of programming books. They are super long and are just pages of unfocused blablabla and screenshots. I miss books like K&R that are well written and concise.

Problem is that padding most non-fiction books is really easy while padding a fiction book is hard. So expect non-fiction to get longer and fiction to get shorter.

View on HN

Actually, as a writer of two fiction books: it's really easy. You just include more pointless description.

Some popular fiction writer (James Patterson? not sure) said, paraphrasing, "You know all those parts you tend to skip over? I just don't write those."

He doesn't write those, but he works with a team of writers to deliver books at the cadence he does, so probably he meant someone else writes those.

I don't think so. I think he meant "that doesn't appear in my books." I'm sure he reads them over critically before sending them off.

anyhow, I'm not even sure he's the one who said that.

Brandon Sanderson wrote about his process of writing Mistborn and putting it through focus groups.

There were apparently several rounds of female readers complaining that he wasn't doing enough description of ballgowns.

My nightmare as a male writer :)

Fortunately I had a female editor who read over stuff like that with a critical eye. And no ball gowns in my books. I do have a wedding but I don't even mention what the bride was wearing. My bad.

I've heard that if you write a technical book on programming and work with a publisher, they'll encourage you to stick code listings in your book.

A friend in the book business once told me that publishers like big thick programming books because they take up space on bookstore shelves and deny that space to rival books!

I suspect K&R may have been written initially as an internal reference (for AT&T).

Though it also pre-dated the era of mass-market computer books, say, 1995--2010 or so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com