alt Hacker News> ...do you think the book is like a money grab or something?
Yes. Regardless of what you intended, IMHO, it comes off as a money grab, and the fact that it glows and "Get the book" is in that high contrast purple doesn't make it better. Maybe it's just me, but I would suggest making it less conspicuous.
edit: and the book image causes a content layout shift when it loads
Replies
Same.
About books: I had a horrible experience in the past with Trailblazer, the Ruby library.
The documentation was horrible, and only had extremely basic examples. The recommendation to any question I saw online was always to buy the book for almost anything. The goal of the bad docs was clearly to encourage people to buy the book. That rubbed me off and it felt like a cash grab.
And of course I'd buy a book and donate for a library I'd want to support, but for Trailblazer's case it's the opposite, I never voluntarily chose to use it and actually would like it to die.
I appreciate the perspective. Honestly for us it was just something that our whole user base was mega excited about, and so we made a big deal about it. It seemed like a positive that there was a book available (especially given that young-ish frameworks benefit from some level of legitimacy, given that it's a Prag Prog book etc.). I never even considered that it would rub people the wrong way honestly.
I think I'll probably keep it front and center for now, given that the book will be launched out of beta in the near future, but I can see how it might give the wrong idea, and will reconsider its placement going forward