Well, my major complaint is that in most (if not all) O'Reilly books,
the author is considered to be God (to quote one author of an O'Reilly
book). There's too much "this is how it is" and "this is how you
solve this particular problem". There is hardly any explaination
why things are the way they are.
If O'Reilly books learn you something, it's just a bunch of tricks.
It's hard to gain actual insight from O'Reilly books. Another problem with
O'Reilly books is the index. The index of the first print of Programming
Perl 3rd edition was missing something very essential, either "Regular
Expression" or "Regex". (Don't have the book here, so I cannot check).
You seldom see a reference in O'Reilly, and if you see one, it's mostly
to one of their own books.
Note that O'Reilly isn't the only publisher whose books are "lacking",
it happens with other publishers too. I just mentioned O'Reilly because
there are so many people dweeping with them. As if having an animal
on your cover makes the content good.
When it comes to technical books, I generally find Addison-Wesley of
a higher quality (but that doesn't mean every A-W book is good!). One
book I really like (and I've learn more Perl from it than all "Perl"
books combined) is Stevens' "Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment".
Then there's of course Knuth. If you want to know how an index
such look like, look in the back of "The Art of Computer Programming".
And don't forget to check out the reference section as well.
Abigail
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