Les Mikesell wrote: > On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 10:15 AM, <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote: >> >>>> But real books don't have that 'search' box up at the top... >>> <SNIP> >>> Agree with one of the other responders about that's what the index is >>> for. One of my "tests" for a book on the subject is to go to the index and >>> see how easy it is to find the answers to some of the questions I have >>> that have moved me to buy a book on the subject. > > If you know the right question ahead of time you probably really don't > need the book. Not necessarily. Sometimes, you know *something* the book covers, but not all, or not nearly all. You can look for answers to stuff you've had trouble solving. > >> Reminds me of the *only* O'Reilly book I didn't like: I think it was >> Larry's original book on Perl - the index was *dreadful*, couldn't find >> anything. > > On the other hand, if you wrote a perl program following those > examples, it would almost certainly still run today, with the only > change it might need being to escape @ symbols that you had in > double-quoted strings. That's pretty rare. Well, yes. And I can do the same with my favorite language of all, ANSI C. Breaking a language, unless there's no other answer, is NOT something I have any sympathy with, he says, remembering how ever sub-release of python 10-12 years ago would break previous system scripts, or then there's ruby now.... mark "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our language, but in our code"