On 9/16/21 10:06 AM, Ron Tarrant wrote:
> My copy of Ali's book just came. Holy crap, it's thick!

Sorry, not very practical as a replacement for watching towels. ;)

> It's never obvious how much effort goes into a work like this until one
> can hold it in one's hands and leaf through. I'm humbled.

I got curious myself and checked: The first mention of drafts of chapters is from July 24, 2009; right after I learned about D and started a Turkish site:

  https://forum.dlang.org/post/thread-20-post-132@ddili.org

(None of the links to drafts in there are live anymore.)

Then I started translating the existing ones to English (as well as writing new chapters), which I announced sporadically. For example, here is the one about 62% completion in September 16, 2012:

  https://forum.dlang.org/post/k33s7g$29rr$1@digitalmars.com

Here is the announcement for 100% translation in July 24, 2014 (to the day of the first Turkish draft announcement!):

  https://forum.dlang.org/post/lqqf2l$b1u$1@digitalmars.com

I continued working on it after the translation was finished. I think one of the last chapters was Operator Precedence, which was in August 15, 2015:

  https://forum.dlang.org/post/1468.11272@ddili.org

After some loss of motivation, I am slowly getting back to improving the book. For example, I went to a coffee shop today to improve the Immutability chapter. (Nothing published yet.)

One of my favorite anecdotes about the book is Andrei telling me that Scott Meyers liked the format of the book was curious who did the formatting. It's been all me! :) DDOC generated HTML pages with the help of CSS and passing all that through Prince XML to produce a PDF, which is the ultimate format that goes to the printers. (And Calibre for the ebook versions.)

Ali

On Thursday, 16 September 2021 at 21:39:31 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> I went to a coffee shop today to improve the Immutability chapter. (Nothing published yet.)

I am looking forward to that! You have stirred my curiosity in
https://forum.dlang.org/post/shfpko$2adb$1@digitalmars.com

— Bastiaan.

On Thursday, 16 September 2021 at 17:06:39 UTC, Ron Tarrant wrote:
> My copy of Ali's book just came. Holy crap, it's thick!

Is this book a new reference for D programmers since TDPL from AA?

Matheus.

On Friday, 17 September 2021 at 12:37:24 UTC, Matheus wrote:
> On Thursday, 16 September 2021 at 17:06:39 UTC, Ron Tarrant wrote:
>> My copy of Ali's book just came. Holy crap, it's thick!
>
> Is this book a new reference for D programmers since TDPL from AA?
>
> Matheus.

No. It has long been the "official tutorial" for the language. I used it when I started using D in 2013.

http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html

On 9/18/21 3:29 AM, Johann Lermer wrote:

> On Thursday, 16 September 2021 at 17:06:39 UTC, Ron Tarrant wrote:
>> My copy of Ali's book just came. Holy crap, it's thick!
>
> Yeah, but funny enough: Although I have the book, too, I only read the
> online version. And I'm using it almost daily.

Someone posted a picture of their physical book being used as a monitor stand. :)

> Ali: you mentioned, that you improve the book occasionally - will those
> changes be visible in the (online-) book? It would be easier to find new
> or changed chapters.

That's the idea: The online version is supposed to be fresh, right after the copy on my laptop. :) I posted how improvements get published recently:


https://forum.dlang.org/thread/lpfwapiajpkpifnnktpw@forum.dlang.org#post-shfpko:242adb:241:40digitalmars.com

Ali

On Saturday, 18 September 2021 at 14:51:48 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> The online version is supposed to be fresh,

Of course :-) No, I meant if those changes are marked or maybe they are mentioned in a list at the end of the book, so that one can easily find them.

Because since D sometimes changes and apart from the occasional discussion here there's nowhere one can keep track of those new features. So, an up-to-date book would be a good place to present new features - but in order to find them easily it would be handy if there was a chapter in the book where all these language changes would be summarized.