HN Books @HNBooksMonth

TLDR: "I'm back after a year's hiatus from blogging... ramble ramble ramble ... And now that I'm rested up, I believe I'm ready to start tech blogging again... in moderation, anyway. The rest and relaxation and research did wonders for me. I used to have lot of open, long-standing concerns about the future of programming and productivity, but my sabbatical last year finally brought me some clojure[0]."

[0] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1934356336?ie=UTF8&tag=...

(Nice affiliate link, but hey I'd do the same)

Is anyone else as torn about long blog posts as I am? On the one hand, I do appreciate good software writing. But I also appreciate concise expressivity, saying more with less. They shouldn't be, and aren't, mutually exclusive.

These days I feel like I'm forced to choose between sacrificing an hour of productive coding to read through a bunch of overly long blog posts at HN and proggit and evaluate whether they were worth reading or not.

⬐ SkyMarshal

Since when do we downmod just for disagreeing with a post? I wasn't trolling.

My concern isn't invalid. Others have also noticed:

Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html

Another good article: http://fitnr.com/filtering-the-web-of-noise/

Don't misunderstand, I <3 Yegge and am glad he's back. His writing taught me stuff that should have been covered in my undergraduate education, and I still refer new programmers to his 'Tour de Babel' essay.

But am I alone in wishing writers would cut to the chase a little more so as to help their readers reduce the info overload and the task of filtering through it quickly?

It's not hard to spend an entire day reading through only the high-quality tech blogs alone, and find, as Paul mentioned, that you did a lot of 'fake work' and very little real work.

⬐ wglb

PG on downvoting and disagreeing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691

⬐ kaens

In my opinion, there really aren't too many high-quality tech blogs (or maybe there are, and I'm just not aware of them).

Steve's stuff is lengthy -- but it's also not posted incredibly often (he's not a career blogger), and I have yet to read much by him that wasn't intellectually or creatively satisfying, and afaict that's rather rare for tech-bloggers.

⬐ bad_user

The book "Dreaming in Code"[1] can also be summarized in a couple of sentences, but you won't walk away with anything from that summary ... that's literature for you.

Also, sacrificing an hour of productive coding by reading good literature increases the chances that you won't grow up to be a dumb fuck.

Steve's articles may not be of much artistic value, but he combines non-fiction with fiction in a wonderful way, explaining his reasoning through plots and drama :) He gets personal, not being afraid to expose his feelings, and I really wish more people would do that.

[1] http://www.dreamingincode.com/

Holloway book is excellent, and only $22 from a monstrously large online seller!

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Clojure-Pragmatic-Programm...

I understand your point, but I think there is a book coming out that I hope will help: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Clojure-Stuart-Halloway/dp...