Hi all,

Not owning TDPL right now, I feel I could learn the language much more quickly with it. But Andrei hinted somewhere that there would be a new edition of his book. Should I wait for it ?

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 06:27:52PM +0200, SomeDude wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Not owning TDPL right now, I feel I could learn the language much more quickly with it. But Andrei hinted somewhere that there would be a new edition of his book. Should I wait for it ?

I had known of D before I bought TDPL. I had a hard time getting started. OT1H I was attracted by the promising features, but OTOH the online documentation (at the time---and arguably even now) was not very newbie friendly. I wasn't getting the positive feedback from my initial attempts to learn it. So I gave it up.

Then one day my wife made me go to a bookstore with her. While there, I offhandedly decided to look for TDPL, on the off-chance that it *might* be in the computer books section. And sure enough, I found it amid all the PHP, Javascript, how-to-build-a-sucky-website books. So I bought it.

Finally, here was something that eased me into D syntax, pointed me to features of interest *and how to use them*.  That's when I seriously began to write real D code, not just some half-hearted toy code attempt to play around with the language. And what can I say? Now I'm just loving every moment of D. (*cough*except for is() syntax*cough).

So it's up to you whether you want to buy the current edition or wait for the next one (with the items in the errata fixed). But having the book will help you learn the language MUCH faster, and use it much more effectively instead of trying to shoehorn C/C++/Java mentality into D code (which often just leads to less-well implemented parts of the language, which leads to bugs/quirks, which leads to frustration with the language).


T

-- 
Computers shouldn't beep through the keyhole.

On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 20:20:45 +0200, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> Then one day my wife made me go to a bookstore with her. While there, I
> offhandedly decided to look for TDPL, on the off-chance that it *might*
> be in the computer books section. And sure enough, I found it amid all
> the PHP, Javascript, how-to-build-a-sucky-website books. So I bought it.

Having *real* computer books in the book shelf..?! You obviously don't live in Norway :)
And it's actually cheaper for me to order the book from Amazon in the US rather than order it in the book-store...

On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 16:27:53 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Not owning TDPL right now, I feel I could learn the language much more quickly with it. But Andrei hinted somewhere that there would be a new edition of his book. Should I wait for it ?

Andrei mentioned it may be time for a new Printing. This would mean that you won't know if you'd get the newest printing when it was done. I'd say buy it now, I don't know the odds of getting new printings.

On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 19:06:27 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 April 2012 at 16:27:53 UTC, SomeDude wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Not owning TDPL right now, I feel I could learn the language much more quickly with it. But Andrei hinted somewhere that there would be a new edition of his book. Should I wait for it ?
>
> Andrei mentioned it may be time for a new Printing. This would mean that you won't know if you'd get the newest printing when it was done. I'd say buy it now, I don't know the odds of getting new printings.

Ah, right, it's a new printing, not a new edition. Thx.
I'll get it through Amazon, I think.

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 08:23:54PM +0200, simendsjo wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Apr 2012 20:20:45 +0200, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> >Then one day my wife made me go to a bookstore with her. While there, I offhandedly decided to look for TDPL, on the off-chance that it *might* be in the computer books section. And sure enough, I found it amid all the PHP, Javascript, how-to-build-a-sucky-website books. So I bought it.
> 
> Having *real* computer books in the book shelf..?! You obviously don't live in Norway :)

lol... apparently I don't!

I have to say, though, that I very, very, VERY rarely buy computer related books. Before TDPL, the last computer-related book I bought was the Perl "camel book". And that was, oh, ... 15 years ago?


> And it's actually cheaper for me to order the book from Amazon in the US rather than order it in the book-store...

To be honest, I rarely find anything of value in my local bookstore's bookshelves. Mostly it's just fiction (novels, comics, and the like), reference books like the 201th edition of the Oxford, maps of outdated places in the world, get-rich-quick-without-doing-work books, and Javascript and PHP books. The fact that TDPL was buried in the midst of that mountain of chaff was probably a miracle in and of itself.


T

-- 
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world. -- Anonymous