(Link goes to: https://mirdin.com/downloads/notes-on-tidy-first/)
Follow the link and you can buy the detailed criticism of the book for $25. Which is more than the cost of the book new on Amazon ($20, or $24.99 for the Kindle version). Seems somewhere between scummy and scammy.
The cost is $130.00 from ANSI or $162.50 from Global. Copies of
the original X3.159 (including the Rationale) are still
available at $205.00 from ANSI or $200.50 from Global. Note
that ANSI derives revenues to support its operations from the
sale of printed standards, so electronic copies are _not_
available.
The mistitled _Annotated ANSI C Standard_, with annotations by
Herbert Schildt, contains all but a few pages of ISO 9899; it is
published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-881952-0, and sells
in the U.S. for approximately $40. (It has been suggested that
the price differential between this work and the official
standard reflects the value of the annotations.)There's nothing deceptive or sneaky about it. There's value in distilling information from a bloated book down to its useful ideas.
There are lots of books that are just existing ideas repackaged for a different audience. For example, Atomic Habits is basically a repackaged version of BJ Fogg's research papers. And people see value in that, so why isn't it okay to do that in a more 1:1 way?
> There's value in distilling information from a bloated book down to its useful ideas.
Yes, but it's not clear at all that this $25 limited-time-only set of notes actually does that, and they cost more than a book that is decidedly not bloated (it's 100 pages, 33 chapters, and each chapter is quite short).
I'm less convinced by the criticism about the notes potentially not being worth the money. That's true of basically all products.
In this case, if the buyer chooses to buy these notes based on the minimal information the author has shared, then the buyer should be ready to accept the possibility that the notes won't be what they expected.
If you look at the link, that's what he actually says.
Sometimes these notes are not things I want to share with the whole world, but might be helpful for a few people.
So what do I do? I release them, but only for a limited time. I also put on a price tag — not because I expect to make any money, but so that only those genuinely interested will read it.I don't see the scummy or the scammy part here. Am I missing something?
Disclaimer: I do really enjoy this book, as it reminds my of uncle Bob’s Clean Code, but a short version, and with the focus on what to do after writing code, when you need to change it or want to understand it better.
Yes, it is structured very much like a collection of blog posts. Which is great for me, as I typically work on learning one “tidying” a day or less. So I am not yet done with the book, end-to-end.