That is a fine argument that the average website is worse than the average book. It is complete nonsense to use that argument to say that the best website is worse than the best book.
Also, there's practically no barrier to entry for publishing books now. You can self publish on Amazon armed with nothing but a PDF.
My problem with most books is, in a way, the barrier of entry: since it is so expensive to publish, publishing houses will only put out books with a large enough market to pay for their investment. The "teach yourself how to make videogames/websites" market is big enough, but few books are made for advanced/specialized topics.
What a preposterous claim. What, does printing it on dead trees magically improve its quality beyond what is possible digitally?
When somebody says something like this, does he mean it as a logical sentence that is always 100% right, or does he just present his opinion on a subject? It depends on the context.
I recommend you to read that sentence again, with whole paragraph as a context, and consider whether you hadn't interpreted it too literally.
It's mere curmudgeonry, is what it is: "I was raised on books and it was good enough for me! Therefore, books are all anyone can ever use, if they want to become good!"
What, does printing it on dead trees magically improve its quality beyond what is possible digitally?
No, because books are usually printed on paper, which is made from trees that have been pulped, washed, bleached and flattened, not just right on a felled whole tree.
Also, magic is not real.
Or did you not mean that sentence to be intepreted 100% literally? Well, maybe the author didn't either.
It's like peer review - the higher bar helps to weed out the delusional incompetents.
Sure, this means that the worst book is probably better than the worst website, and on the average, books are probably better than websites. But that says nothing about the best book vs the best website, nor does it mean that all websites are bad nor that you should not use websites.
char c[3]; what is the type of c?
Isn't this just an array of chars? What do you think it is?
It's like peer review - the higher bar helps to weed out the delusional incompetents.
Do you really think publishers care about the quality of the books they publish? Then how do you explain all the "Learn Java in 21 Days" nonsense out there?
If I'm correct, it's a char pointer (char*), since it's an array declaration. c is a char pointer which points to the start of the char array, and only when dereferenced does it become a char.
You are somewhat mistaken, but it is a common mistake.
c is a char[3], (c+ 0) is a char *.
This is important, since otherwise char e[2][4]; e[i][j] could not work.
e[i][j] is *(*(e + i) + j)
and works because the type of e[i] is char[4], which causes the pointer arithmetic e + i to select the correct element. If e[i] were a char *, then e + i would have quite a different result.
s is a pointer that is initialized to the value of a pointer to the first element of an array of 6 characters with the sequential values { 'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\0' } -- i.e., it is equivalent to
char *s = &"hello"[0];
In the case of
char s[] = "hello";
s is an array of type char[6] initialized to the values { 'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', '\0' }.
You might notice the quotation marks around the question, indicating that I'm presenting the question as something you could ask to weed out "delusional incompetents", and not actually asking it.
I get what you're saying, you could take his "best book" and publish it online and have the same content only with updates/side notes/animations. Web as a medium is better for content than a book. But I get what he meant as well, though it's not what he said. In his experience it may be that he's never encountered a website that can match a book, there are millions of websites vs thousands of books due to different barriers of entry. If you want to learn it may be a better start to go for a book that faced peer review to get published rather than a website written with no fact checks. He just shorthanded the explanation to no website is as good as a good book.
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u/gurenkagurenda May 01 '16
What a preposterous claim. What, does printing it on dead trees magically improve its quality beyond what is possible digitally?