Updates for books?

Community
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The most recent books listed on this page were last published in Nov 2016. As Julia is going through a lot of changes, I think it is important to get them updated (e.g. I was going through the Julia for Data Science book yesterday and some examples no longer works.) Does anyone know if any of those books are being revised or new ones coming out?

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There may be a new one coming out with No Starch Press, but if there is it would be some distance away.

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I use this book and the codes still work

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It has a chapter called Object-Oriented Programming.

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I kind of notice that many books published by Apress or Packt, regardless of what language it is about, have a chapter call OOP and another chapter called Metaprogramming. I am not sure if this is the common style of writing a programming book…

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Speaking of Julia books, does anyone know what happened to the book that Leah Hanson was supposed to write for O’Reilly?

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I’ve noticed that most Packt books that do this don’t know Julia and almost copied things over from another book (usually Python of the same author). There’s a lot of low quality books out there written by people who are not Julia programmers and so I don’t think you should trust that something is good idiomatic Julia just because it comes from a book. A book on Julia should be recreated from scratch to fully utilize the language properly.

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9

Well said. After looking at all these these books I came to the conclusion that the best reference to learn Julia today is still the official documentation…

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I agree. I’ve gone through a couple of Packt books and they are very shallow. It seems that they just want to get the books out quickly.

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I haven’t looked through it too thoroughly, but I know that @aviks wrote a book and he knows what he’s doing, so that’s a Packt book which is worth looking at. The other though… yeah…

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Time to write a book Chris.

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I think we are in this position where everyone who knows enough to write a book on Julia, and may have the time and commitment for it, knows people who know even more who he/she thinks would be more suitable to write THE book on Julia. But these really knowledgeable people are just too busy developing the language itself, that they can’t afford the time to write the book now. And any book which doesn’t give inside information of what’s happening under the hood in Julia will be another attempt at explaining the documentation which if core developers are writing it, they would probably just spend the time improving the documentation instead. So the end result is that we have some attempts to simplify Julia and explain it to people from different programming backgrounds, which at best will be a subset of the documentation (kudos to the authors if so), and at worst can have serious mistakes and wrong claims about the language. I guess viewing the above in light of Julia only exiting the flux recently, it is only expected, but I think it’s time for some good up-to-date books to enter the market. I am not saying every book out there is bad, but I think we need more good ones.

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I just checked and found two Leah Hanson books on Safari Online. They’re short… looks like chapters of the book. I wonder what happened to the rest since it’s been 4 months since October…

Learning Julia: Introduction to Types (Oct 2017)

Learning Julia: Abstract, Concrete, and Parametric Types (Sep 2017)

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That’s what I would rather see as well. Once 1.0 is out they can do whatever they want :wink:

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I agree. Furthermore, given that there is a freely available manual leaning toward a tutorial-style approach in many places, I am not sure what niche a book would fill.

I would rather see books using Julia, not about Julia. For example, many stats textbooks use R, giving a short intro in the first chapters or the appendix, gradually extending it later on as they solve domain-specific problems. Peter Norvig’s AI books are another example of this.

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I don’t think that book is happening any more.

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Thanks for the kind words, Chris. My book on Julia performance will be updated for 1.0, hopefully in time for the release, or soon after.

Also, I know Malcom Sherrington is working on updating his book to 1.0.

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