Posted by azhenley 12/31/2025
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.
I find it quite difficult to find quality programming books that actually deal with the details and waste no pages explaining the basics that can be found in literally any other book about a specific language/technology.
When it was mentioned that the publisher demanded the book be "dumbed down" it wasn't a surprise to me at all. I also think it's hurting sales of programming/SWE books at large as beginners are more likely to just use up-to-date Internet tutorials than books, but those more experienced who would benefit from in-depth books can only find the dumbed-down ones.
Another bonus feature, would be to remove: breakfast, appetizers, and salads from all cook books, or put them in the back where no one needs to look at them.
Although I have found that cookbooks that don't include the useless fluff to pad the book out are usually much better, like the cookbooks from Milkstreet or Love and Lemons, So I guess it's actually a decent way to just filter out all the crap books.
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 can't stand books that start with a half-baked Python tutorial. It's not only wasting the time of people who know, but worse, it's wasting the time of people who don't.
Because a one-chapter explanation on the topic is always going to be so superficial that the people who actually need it will never have the details they actually require to get up to speed. You will give them the illusion of understanding, only to let them hit a wall the first time they try any.
Before uv, install python package was a topic that required a lot more than a quick intro, explaining virtualenv, branching depending on OSes, even backtracking how to source the Python installer.
Better to just say "mastering this is a requirement prior reading the book" and be done with it.
There are full books on the topic that can actually help.
Replace this useless chapter with more content to which the book is actually dedicated.
One important aspect to this is that a typical first-book technical author knows well the subject matter, and sometimes knows how to write too (but usually not, as was my case), but does not know how to edit, typeset, publish, market, and sell well. That's what the publisher knows best. And of course, they want sales, and they understand that overall beginner books sell better than advanced/expert level books.
I encourage the author to continue writing and self-publish, and at a later time a publisher come to package and market a mostly finished product.
The publisher expended time and money on the author and got nothing in return. This isn’t surprising, and it’s why first-time author royalties are so low.
While writing I have had similar feeling as the author to publisher/editor comments, especially related to:
> The unhelpful feedback was a consistent push to dumb down the book (which I don't think is particularly complex but I do like to leave things for the reader to try) to appease a broader audience and to mellow out my personal voice.
I also remember being very frustrated at times with the editor needing things "dumbed down". I used to get very annoyed and think "didn't you pay attention! We covered that!" But then I realized: If I can make this easy to understand by a fairly non-technical editor at a first pass, it absolutely will make this book better for the reader.
Publishers have a lot of experience publishing books, so I've learned that their advice is often not bad.
There was also plenty of advice from the editors I vehemently didn't agree with, so I pushed back and quickly realized: publishers need you more than you need them, so very often you do get final say.
But you still have to actually write the book. Book writing is hard, and a much more complex process than writing blog posts. Personally I feel all the editorial feedback I've gotten over the years has made not only my books better, but also has really pushed my writing to be higher quality.
Another constraint of a technical book that I didn't see mentioned here was that time almost has to be very limited during the writing process. I worked on a couple mobile development/design books, and an iOS 18 programming and design guide is worthless after Apple announced Liquid Glass last summer. At 2+ years into the project and seemingly only 1/3rd complete, the publisher really needs to be sure the content will still be relevant after released.
The author had all the leverage regarding content. It’s not like the publisher could actually incorporate what they were asking for with AI, they still need an author to do that and it was a totally new subject at the time. Their demands were empty.
I don’t think the author would have finished the book if it was self-published. They clearly didn’t want to write a book that badly.
Not to say that finishing a whole-ass book is easy, I’m certainly not going to pretend that’s the case.
I’ve lately been trying to finish more side project type things in my life because these dead ends themselves feel empty to me. I am trying to set scope reasonably and then just finish even if it’s painful or there’s no confetti-style payout and nobody else cares.
That was my read as well. The book deal fell apart because the author never wrote most of the book.
This explains why some books I picked up earlier in my career had great depth but there was always a way-too-basic-programming-intro chapter duct taped in the beginning. So now I have an idea of how they are squeezed in.
I wrote ten tech books for big publishers (McGraw-Hill, J. Wiley, Springer Verlag, etc.) and I was so happy being a published author. However, about twenty hears ago I moved to self-publishing, finally ending up using Leanpub. I am much happier only writing self-published eBooks now because I can update my old books as needed. I still write new books from scratch (just started a book that is basically a rant against over-spend of SOTA LLMs called ‘Winning Big with Small AI’) but hardly a week goes by without an update to an older book.
Writing is great, and even better when not attatched to a conventional publisher.
Austin: if you are here, good luck, and enjoy writing!
I used to keep statistics: about 1 in 60 people who read online buy a book, except for my Common Lisp book that had a 1 in 20 purchase ratio. As you might imagine, I put more effort into the Common Lisp book.
For 30 years writing tech books was an economic driver for my career as a computer scientist. Now that I am retired I still write because I enjoy writing and interacting with my readers.
https://kevmo.io/zero-to-code/
I inked the deal in 2023, but shortly after felt like the market was too dead for newbies. When I initially removed the website for the book, I got a small wave of complaints, so I guess some folks still found it helpful.
Publishers can be great, but if you want control of your book, just self-publish it.
The most valuable (IMO) service publishers provide is feedback. If you have a small online presence, it isn't hard to get feedback from others.