Since the dawn of time, (or at least of the printing press), there has been the effort to impress causal readers with fancy, printed book covers. For the most part, educational and scientific books have eluded these efforts. It’s probably why when people think of a book about coding, they imagine chunky typefaces and horrendous block-quotes of line-numbered source code, (or, as the Luddite call it, “gibberish”).
Then came O’Reilly and his onslaught of black and woodblocks of wonderfully foreign animals. After all, what business does a camel have learning Perl, anyway? Regardless, the new and fresh cover matched an epoch in programming/coding reference books. Gone were the days of black and gray boxes, laden with cross references and appendices; now, we have analogies and metaphors to spare. Reading up on honing your skills as a software engineer just got a whole lot more interesting.
But, you have to draw the line somewhere…and I’m very glad Dave Thomas, (the programmer, not Wendy’s uncle), did. Look at a humorous reworking of one of his past titles:
