Show HN: Sublime Text Book
sublimetextbook.com
sublimetextbook.com
For a standard nonfiction e-book, that price is fairly high, but when it comes to software/programming books, you expect it to be a bit higher than average.
I took a look at some O'Reilly titles around the same price point, and specifically at books that are similar to this, where you're really learning about how to make use of a particular software program's features, rather than how to write in a particular programming language or understand a particular abstract concept or niche in software development.
"Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac" is 200 pages, $30 for a print edition.
"Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought" is 346 pages, $30 for a print edition.
"Learning GNU Emacs: A Guide to Unix Text Processing" is 536 pages, $36 for an e-book.
It seems to be generally the case, and these examples bear it out, that e-books are priced lower than physical copies, and shorter books are priced lower than longer books. I would add that niche books (where the information is hard to find elsewhere) also command a premium.
Based on that, I would suggest that this Sublime Text book should probably be priced a bit lower. It's an e-book, it's only 220 pages, and though it's nice to have all of the information conveniently packaged in one place, it seems like the majority of the book talks about stuff you can easily Google about (and typically find a high-quality answer, precisely because the Sublime Text community is so large and active).
Edit: I don't usually complain about downvotes, but it's pretty evident that people are downvoting this because they disagree, not because they think it doesn't add anything substantive to the discussion. I'm an author myself, so I know how much work goes into producing (and marketing) a book, and I'm totally supportive of the author trying to make the project worth his time. I'm merely pointing out that if you look at the market, its list price should probably be closer to the "with coupon" price.
That's not to say that there isn't any variation at all. This book may, in fact, be more information-dense than similar books in its category. But I was observing that publishers' prices and book length do tend to be correlated, warranted or not, and so to be competitive, it may be beneficial to price accordingly.
Edit: I just read through the sample chapter, and I didn't find it much more information-dense than other similar books. Which doesn't really surprise me, because you can only write so tersely when you're doing things like feature set walkthroughs. So I think I'm going to stand by my statement that for books of this particular type (a user guide for a piece of software), the length of the book is probably a pretty good proxy for breadth and a not-bad proxy for value.
I think you're getting downvoted because people disagree with your advice to the author. In other words, you aren't adding value to the discussion about what value the book can bring because your premise is rooted in a totally obsolete measuring stick (i.e. # of pages). The value of information/education is immeasurable. Let the market decide.
Doesn't the parent comment address that with : it seems like the majority of the book talks about stuff you can easily Google about (and typically find a high-quality answer, precisely because the Sublime Text community is so large and active)
Some people are willing to pay for brevity.
A quote from Pascal: "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." (I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.)
Yes, that's why people downvote a lot of things. There's no policy or even guidance against using downvoting for that reason, to the best of my knowledge. (And this is what I was told when I raised similar annoyance a few years ago ;-))
I think calling it a book for power users is highly optimistic. Much of it seems to be more like the manual ST should have had but never has, describing routine tools and pointing out keyboard shortcuts that you could find for yourself just exploring the default keyboard map. That is certainly a useful gap to fill, but there seems to be little if anything in the table of contents about real power user features like defining or customising languages, templates/snippets, themes, plugins, etc. I hope the choice of title doesn't lead to disappointment from actual power users while causing those who would enjoy and benefit from the book to go elsewhere.
I did notice that the sample chapter PDF has quite a few obvious layout problems, and that the expanded TOC on the web site has obvious typos, so the jury is out on editorial/production quality.
As a final comment, the author seems very keen on ST3, which makes me hesitant. I gave up and installed ST3 myself a little while ago, after too many packages I relied on self-updated into just not working any more on ST2. Now instead of a productive text editor that I enjoyed and recommended a year or two ago, I have a crash-prone, bug-ridden mess, which just has different packages I used to rely on that don't work reliably instead. So I'm pretty down on the whole fragmented ST ecosystem and lack of progress/support for existing customers right now. While I assume none of this is the author's fault, perhaps the timing of this book launch is unfortunate; it might be a better buy if and when ST3 and its package ecosystem are up to production quality, updated to reflect whatever the best available supporting packages are at that time.
But the bottom line is it doesn't really matter whose fault it is. I used to have an editing suite using ST2 and powerful plugins like SublimeLinter and SublimeCodeIntel that worked very well for me. Now I don't, and no combination of ST version and available plugins for that version will get me back there short of figuring out which packages I used to have and then going back to ST2 and manually installing historical versions of each of them assuming they are still available. Since ST without those powerful plugins is a decent text editor but nowhere near adequate for professional software/web development, the currently fragmented and broken ST ecosystem is their problem one way or another even if it isn't supposed to be their fault.
> While you should be migrated to version 3 already, this book covers both versions 2 and 3 - when there are differences or new functionality in a later version I make a point of saying so and offer solutions to users still on version 2.
Yeah, I guess I just don't understand why I "should be migrated to version 3 already" when a non-dev build has yet to be released. Seems like a nice book otherwise.
Is it a interesting website, that we can experience and talk about? Is it code? Is it an interesting business idea?
In this case, I think this "Show HN" post is advertsing only.
I've clearly lost brain cells as I've gotten older, but I think I've been able to maintain a constant rate of learning new things by reducing the amount of slack and drag in how I work (and read)...I really like the selling point of "As a developer, I value my time at $100/hr and this book will save me 30 min/day...This means I will have an extra $12,500 per year". That's a nice way to think about it, though it probably underestimates the impact of more time in life.
I like the pricing of the video (at least at the launch price)...I almost never learn via video (yes, I'm that old) but for an extra $9 (or +$5 of the regularly-priced book)...that's not at all a bad deal. And I've been trying to make screencasts on workflow and tooling and am always interested in how the pros teach with video.
So, sold.
If the optimization itself is only worth a few seconds but it allows me to remain focused on whatever I'm actually working on, it becomes much more valuable.
Just because you get paid $100/hr doesnt mean you value your time at $100/hr. In fact in means that you value your time LESS than $100/hr (though not by how much).
In theory, yes, the time someone spends working is worth less to them than what they are paid. Hence why they spend it working.
But, in theory, they only stop working because the remaining time they have left in the day is at that point worth more to them than their hourly pay.
[0] http://code.tutsplus.com/courses/perfect-workflow-in-sublime...
When you are selling a book for $36, the bar is a little higher in terms of the quality of the presentation.
I also suggest a new version of the sample as soon as the new version of the book itself is done.
Only one can be used, so the $10 off is better than the $5 one.
Edit: And in the time it took me to complain, he already responded. Way to stay on top of things!
I've evaluated it for the past 6 months but looks like they finally convinced me to fork over the cash. If you've been evaluating for more than a few months and you're not a student, pay up!
Edit: I expected the downvote, but honestly believe that a discussion on this could be valuable. If you're going to downvote me, in return please tell me why you think this question shouldn't be asked.
Because otherwise you're breaking the law, not to mention screwing whoever put in the hard work to create something you obviously find valuable.
You're breaking the law? No, you're not. On the download page it explicitly says "There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation."
Screwing them over? Ridiculous. They've explicitly given me permission to not pay them! I'd be doing them a favor if I paid them. I would be showing them a lot of respect. That is a good thing, but it is not inherently bad to accept their charity and use the software freely.
As far as I can tell, it's a clever business strategy for disseminating free software, with the hope that people will purchase it out of respect for the art. It's a clever business move because it gets the software out there in mass so that it becomes popular.
They shouldn't expect everyone to buy the software when they explicitly say they don't define a time limit in which one has to pay. I would bet that they even don't expect this.
So when i find a really nice piece of software that actually saved me a lot of money (by increasing productivity and reducing licensing cost of other dev tools), i don't mind paying them a 70$ one time fee.
Because in the end, they are not going to pay their employees with your respect.
So, you have all the right not to pay them, you also have the right to leave shitty tips all the time and to not go voting.
But i think i don't need to explain what will happen if we all act like that.
It's free to evaluate for as long as you'd like. Once you start seriously using it, and making money with it, you need to buy it.
The key words there are "for the evaluation". As soon as you're using the product for real, you are required to pay for it.
Screwing them over? Ridiculous. They've explicitly given me permission to not pay them!
No, they have given you permission not to pay them while you evaluate the product. After that, you are explicitly required to pay them if you want to use it for real work.
"Sublime Text may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use."
The developer could try to enforce this rule by building in DRM or by threatening legal action, but those things would make for a pretty crappy user experience. Instead, the author chose to do the right thing by users and provide an evaluation version with no restrictions.
Legally and technically, you can certainly use Sublime Text without paying for it. To me, though, using Sublime Text for your everyday work without paying for it is the ethical equivalent of using a cracked version of Photoshop.
Adobe's Photoshop license doesn't do anything like this. If you crack it, you're breaking the rules.
I think it's a gray area, but it's undeniably true that paying for a license is a respectful thing to do at the very least.
Sure you can use it for free, but if you use it everyday and earn money on the code you make using it, it would be a fine gesture to support the developer.
3 years of editor use for $70 (or somewhat less at the time) is not that much...
I was hoping that Atom would be better or comparable, but just doesn't feel as solid as Sublime. So laggy.
Has anyone read this book? Good reviews?
Is that the sole reason for learning vim? I mean I am all for investing in productivity, but vim seems to be a tool for geeks to boast about and surprise a lay-person how fast they can work. Is it worth the time you invest to get used to it when you compare it to Sublime Text?
Oh and the learning curve thing is greatly exaggerated, often by vim users themselves, seeking to brag to everyone about how they mastered the "fearsome learning curve of vim".
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[1]: -- http://yehudakatz.com/2010/07/29/everyone-who-tried-to-convi...
I use Sublime Text now.
Why? It's hella fast. It has a great plugin infrastructure and community. It has lots of 21st century niceties with regards to its GUI, retina support, etc. It stays out of my way. Even the ST3-dev versions have been rock solid for me (on OS X, other OSs may vary).
But most of it it's this: the things VIM does, and they are nice, are not that interesting to me. I know how to split and recombine text in 200 different ways, move in all directions by various amounts, do stuff with selections, play with buffers, etc etc.
Those are not the problems I have when I write code. For an admin, or a text monkey this kind of stuff might be more useful. For me they're more like circus acts useful in rare ocassions. In most cases I'm writing like 10 words per minute -- because I'm thing, debugging, designing APIs, and whatever we programmers do.
(I still use Vim whenever I SSH into some server, and as the EDITOR set in the shell).
The epub looks pretty good on the iPad.
great work on the sales page! looks very well done.
one thing you can think about: why not let users give you their email address to get the free chapter?
I've been trying out Sublime for a couple of months because I wanted a light editor (i.e. not an IDE) and that isn't so difficult to configure as Emacs.
Unfortunately Sublime ain't it. The problem is that my Emacs works better out of the box for everything it does that's important to me. I often find myself unproductive in Sublime, then I go searching for a plugin, then I find myself frustrated because the plugin I found doesn't work well enough for me.
Then I realized the reason for why I moved away from Emacs - it's so good in the things that it does well that you find yourself wanting more, you find yourself wanting to learn ELisp and then you get disappointed by how hard that is. Personally I'm currently rooting for LightTable, hoping to be the successor of Emacs. But it's still too young to tell and maybe a little too flashy for my taste.
I also work with Vim. For replacing Vim it depends on what you do with it. It's more comfortable than Vim for working on projects, but nothing else is better than Vim for quick stuff. Also - all plugins in all editors providing a "Vim mode" suck - that dual mode in Vim's personality is simply incompatible with how the other editors work.
On pricing - I find Sublime to be expensive and the author is releasing paid updates that are minor in delivering new functionality, yet you feel compelled to upgrade because that's were the fixes go.
Upgrading Sublime costs me about the same with IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and that's really not right, because IntelliJ IDEA is a really good IDE clearly worth every penny, plus it has an open-source edition so I'm confident that even if the company goes under, the project can still survive. Whereas Sublime competes with Vim and Emacs, both free, both awesome in what they do and both still being around in 50 years from now.
There are some things that Sublime does well. Things like Textmate-like snippets (available in Emacs in an awesome plugin btw - Yasnippet), multiple cursor editing or "go to everything". Compared to TextMate, at least it works multi-platform and have been using it without problems on both Ubuntu and OS X, but that's not a problem that Vim users have :)
But try it out by yourself, because this choice is personal and nobody else will be able to tell you what's the best environment for you.
* Vim in Windows never felt good to me. * Multi-cursor editing * auto-recover unsaved files upon loading the program * snippets (type a little get a lot back) * the ability to use a hotkey to open files quickly * the robust hotkeys, regexs, and visual feedback are on par or better than vim.
However, the thing holding me back is, I've recently switched from SublimeText to Atom.
I didn't see much development on the SublimeText front, and Atom seemed to have a growing community.
For anybody that's purchased it - what are your thoughts on how applicable this might be Atom? Or helpful to somebody using it?
(I know that Atom is "inspired" by SublimeText)
I just wanted to note that although Atom is a derivative of Sublime Text, they may not end up having 100% feature parity. That may not be a problem due to the ease of creating an Atom package.