Sunday, May 13, 2012

An open note to authors of technical books

When writing the nth book on Ruby/Python/R/Lucene/Hadoop/etc to hit the shelves, there is absolutely no need to include a "How to Install Ruby/Python/R/Lucene/Hadoop/etc" section.

News item: there's this thing called "the Internet". Anyone following your instructions on downloading and installing the very subject of your book probably already has access to it.