Review on amazon.com

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, October 15, 2010 13:44:07 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> TDPL received an interesting review on amazon.com from Philip R. Heath
> (http://tinyurl.com/2daz64k) which mentions among other things:
> 
> "2. Good code examples - Core Java had fairly extensive examples, and
> readers could download the code. This is a great service to readers
> because the code compiled (for the most part) with no errors. I used the
> examples as a starting point to explore features and modify them the
> listings to see different behaviors and scenarios. The examples in The D
> Programming Language are sparse and not available for download."
> 
> It turns out it would be trivial to make all of TDPL's samples available
> for download. Do you think this would add value?

Personally, I don't care. I read examples in a programming book to get the 
concepts, not to run them. However, there are plenty of programmers out there 
who like to run the examples from books, so - particularly if it's easy - it 
would probably be a good idea.

Also, if it's particularly easy for you to set it up so that they could be 
downloaded, does that mean that it would be easy for you to set them up in unit 
tests? That being the case, you should probably consider creating unit tests 
from them to help gauge how in line with TDPL dmd is. Obviously it would be far 
from perfect, but it could be of some value.

- Jonathan M Davis