Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcormier | Hacker News Reader

I've never heard of this but the 10 rules of a Zen program are very poorly written. http://www.grobmeier.de/the-10-rules-of-a-zen-programmer-030...

I found two glaring mistakes very quickly, which makes me wonder how many mistakes are in this book.

1. Focus " You’ll not become quicker, just you work multithreaded." 3. Beginners Mind "Remember the days were you were a beginner."

View on HN

> I am not a native speaker, but English felt natural. The first version of my book was horrible to read. There were tons of grammar and spelling errors. I decided to work with an editor who helped me: Zach Low. If you buy the book, you can expect a book in well-written English.

I think it's pretty clear it's written by someone who isn't a native English speaker. There is a difference between poorly written and expressing yourself in an unfamiliar grammar. When I started programming, someone could have looked at my code and said "This is poorly written" which technically would be true but wouldn't be a particularly generous way to judge the merits of my program. There are times when content and concepts are more important than exactly how they are expressed. Certainly, content and concepts are more powerful when expressed clearly but criticizing a piece like this because of grammatical mistakes seems to be missing the forest for the trees here.

The book supposedly had an editor, but there's more to editing than checking for typos. Random sampling: (about a co-worker who felt he was underpaid) "He did not need the money anyways. After taxes, he couldn't even fuel his car." Does that make sense to anyone else?

I haven't read the whole thing yet, and frankly don't know if I'll make it through. The book rambles along, and its cohesion seems to be lacking. I hesitate to ding anyone's hard work, but in retrospect I'd rather to have paid about half of the $20USD I spent on it.

The way I interpreted this part was that the extra 100€ the unhappy guy in the story wanted wouldn't have been able to fuel his car after taxes were accounted for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com