Should I wait for the new edition of TDPL ?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 06:27:52PM +0200, SomeDude wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Not owning TDPL right now, I feel I could learn the language much
> more quickly with it. But Andrei hinted somewhere that there would
> be a new edition of his book. Should I wait for it ?

I had known of D before I bought TDPL. I had a hard time getting
started. OT1H I was attracted by the promising features, but OTOH the
online documentation (at the time---and arguably even now) was not very
newbie friendly. I wasn't getting the positive feedback from my initial
attempts to learn it. So I gave it up.

Then one day my wife made me go to a bookstore with her. While there, I
offhandedly decided to look for TDPL, on the off-chance that it *might*
be in the computer books section. And sure enough, I found it amid all
the PHP, Javascript, how-to-build-a-sucky-website books. So I bought it.

Finally, here was something that eased me into D syntax, pointed me to
features of interest *and how to use them*.  That's when I seriously
began to write real D code, not just some half-hearted toy code attempt
to play around with the language. And what can I say? Now I'm just
loving every moment of D. (*cough*except for is() syntax*cough).

So it's up to you whether you want to buy the current edition or wait
for the next one (with the items in the errata fixed). But having the
book will help you learn the language MUCH faster, and use it much more
effectively instead of trying to shoehorn C/C++/Java mentality into D
code (which often just leads to less-well implemented parts of the
language, which leads to bugs/quirks, which leads to frustration with
the language).


T

-- 
Computers shouldn't beep through the keyhole.