One is that many are very cryptic. They seem to assume one already knows the fine points of the language in question. If you already knew the language, why would you even bother reading a book on it?
Another is the way the books break down the language. They break it down instruction by instruction, without really doing a good job tying together all the pieces that are required to write a functional program. For example, you must be able to use arrays, variables, operators and input/output all in the same work in order to write a real world program, but the books handle these all as discreet items.
Finally, there is a lack of holistic approach. Very few books touch on the underlying principals such as compact code, robustness, portability, functionality, optimisation and other points that make a good piece of code a great piece of code. A good book on this is Eric S. Raymond's
'The Art of UNIX Programming' but it does teach one code, it only teaches the broader principals.
Programming books...Lacking in roubustness by DD-49 network is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.
Based on a work at network-computer-info.blogspot.com.
These are just some surface observations I have made of technical publications that I wished to share.
