On Monday, 19 July 2021 at 03:52:51 UTC, SealabJaster wrote:

I stepped into D alongside Andrei and Ali's books. Ali's one I was aware it existed but I didn't start to read it until I stepped into D. Andrei's one I have it (in dead-tree-media format) since a few years back (this book and a few things over there on the net were what sparked my interest in D to begin with) but didn't get the time to start messing with D until a few months ago. To me, there are two excellent books for totally different reasons:

• Andrei's one is elegant, has style and finesse all over the place, is superbly organized more-or-less as I expect a programming language book has to be (or what I used to expect until I read Ali's one), it is always at my desk, and even when I am not coding I open it randomly and read a couple of pages while having coffee etc. I now it is outdated for a lot of things (2010), I would love to see a second edition of this book, really.

• Ali's one is minimalist, pragmatic all the way-round, now that I learned he's a self-taught programmer I understand why this book is what it is (the foreword by Andrei explains this better than my words); at first it seemed to me the book was something like a huge collection of small articles not caring much about structure/organization/classification/whatever, at second glance I thought: this is the way we, self-taught programmers learn a new language: we didn't read huge section/chapters depicting the fundamentals and, then, only then, we did go to next big ticket, no, eg: we didn't learned everything under the sun about strings before we started to write our hello world's, we revisited strings further along our learning-curve the moment we needed something else, the book is a snapshot of a developer's learning curve: functions, more functions, even more functions, things like that.

But I didn't explore the more esoteric things yet; (I was aware that UDAs existed, I did glanced at them on Ali's book, but never made the connection with something akin this issue) the only thing that I read top-to-bottom up to this point was Philippe Sigaud's templates in D (attempting to solve some issue I did have back then), and there are a lot of things that I quite not fully-understand yet.