Eventually, the ebook versions of my review may cost more than the operating system.
Preeminent Mac OS X reviewer John Siracusa on the curious relationship between technologies and stories about those technologies, Hypercritical podcast, episode 78, 18th minute (via siracusasaidso). I wonder how much of Apple's market cap is attributable to the storytelling abilities of Steve Jobs.
The Saddest Shelf In The Library
Fuck that! "Philip and Alex's Guide To Web Publishing" changed my life. You can read it here, though it's been heavily revised since the original (per Philip Greenpun's very practical philosophy of what a book should be), so anyone with a library this cool should check out a copy (and then somehow transport yourself to 1998, if at all possible, for context).
In all seriousness, Greenspun set a bar and a vision for long-form web writing that has been sadly marginalized. There's something very touching, 13 years on, about the "Philip and Alex's" chapters in which he argues for the web as an accessible form of education. This is a book that can remind those of us writing online what the hell we're working toward.
Gruber:
Hot off the O’Reilly presses: Matt Neuburg’s 834-page iOS programming tome.
Oh boy: An obese time suck whose reference section will probably be obsolete by the time FedEx drops it off on my doorstep.
Is it still 1991? Do we still need every class and function call documented because gopher is slow on our 1200 baud modems? Are our lives less busy than they were then? Has the number of technologies we need to read about gone down? Are languages developing less quickly?
I'm sure Neuberg has some stellar writing in this thing; his Frontier: The Definitive Guide was the third programming book I ever owned and was immensely helpful. I remember being grateful that someone cared enough to write such a thorough book about such a small platform. I'm also sure that many people will get a lot of value out of this. It may prove to be the definitive iOS guide.
But how long is it going to take to teach technical publishers -- and readers -- that brevity is a feature, not a bug? If O'Reilly were to cut this book to a quarter of its size it would make it exponentially more useful. Ditto for the Rails book (Pragmatic), Learning Jquery (Packt), and the JavaScript Rhino (O'Reilly).
Paper and bandwidth are cheap, but reader time is valuable.
If you want to "get a solid grounding in all the fundamentals of Cocoa Touch," you need something that will nestle snugly your skull, not rapidly distend it. Besides, valuing quality over quantity is what made the iOS platform successful in the first place, isn't it?
[Related]
HTML is not just one output format among many; it is the format of our age…
We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and – if you can manage to get anybody’s attention – get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed!
Some of Mark Pilgrim's insights into the future of book publishing, as woven into this article about his workstation setup. (Related.)