alt Hacker NewsI would have 100% bought the book the author initially pitched. I could do without the junk the publisher wanted him to add, and really it would have probably caused me to not buy the book.
I've come to hate every cookbook that starts with 100 pages of here is a tour of my pantry, which sounds a lot like, here is how to use pip!
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Honestly, I wouldn't consider publishing a book if it didn't have that information. There's no reason to give up half or more of the potential market for a book because it's arbitrarily pitched at advanced users. Assuming the customer knows how to use pip would be crazy.
> I've come to hate every cookbook that starts with 100 pages of here is a tour of my pantry
To each their own. As someone who learned to cook as an adult, I’ve appreciated seeing both what someone has and what nonsense I own that they manage just fine without.
> I've come to hate every cookbook that starts with 100 pages of here is a tour of my pantry, which sounds a lot like, here is how to use pip!
Yeah I agree. I hate when books do more hand holding than the reader clearly needs to the point of tedium. Plus many of those setup steps like how to use a package manager change over time and make the book stale instead of evergreen. And Austin was clearly not writing an absolute beginners book.
That's why when I pitched both the Classic Computer Science Problems series and Computer Science from Scratch I explicitly told publishers in the proposals that I was not writing a beginners book (been there, done that). I was clear that I was writing an intermediate book for people that already know programming.
It's a different, more narrow audience. But you can be successful if you write a good book. It's also a less tapped market and luckily publishers were able to see that.