A book review written in JavaScript

http://www.robinsloan.com/summer-reading/and-programming/

by bpierre • 14 years ago

55 13 14 years ago

robinsloan• 14 years ago

Author here: Cool to see this here, bpierre. Thank you. I really hope some HN readers decide to give this book a look; it's really shockingly good, all the more so for having been written in 1997. I'm a decidedly amateur programmer, but even I found myself nodding my head, thinking: "Yes, that's it. That's it!"

shalmanese• 14 years ago

bought, thanks

iamdann• 14 years ago

This is absolutely fantastic.

breadbox• 14 years ago

I discovered Ellen Fullman by chance back in the 90s. Unfortunately she hasn't writing any nonfiction since that I know of -- her last two books are both novels. "The Bug" is a fun read, particularly if you've ever had to do any low-level GUI programming back in the pre-browser days, but it's a little thin overall. Haven't read her newest one yet.

If she started writing nonfiction again, I'd buy it sight unseen.

cleverjake• 14 years ago

This was fun. Definitely more engaged with it than the average review, though I think that the novelty would wear off quickly after this first one.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

Of course, but this is a one-time thing. Do it once, it's a fun novelty. But you'd never really do it again.

nene• 14 years ago

Neat, but it's still a very linear narrative, with the addition of having to type in commands to be able to read the next section.

Would have been much better if the review was exposed as an API which you could explore freely. And maybe some embedded silly programming challenges to be able to more effectively read the review. e.g. the example paragraph API could have just .nextChar() and .hasMoreChars() methods, so one would have to write a loop to comfortably read the example.

Opportunities are endless, though the book itself looks interesting.

badhairday• 14 years ago

The interactive review was fun and caught my attention. The book has been purchased.

mikeleeorg• 14 years ago

Neat, hitting the up-arrow did what I expected it to do.

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

"The disorder of the desk, the floor; the yellow Post-it notes everywhere; the whiteboards covered with scrawl: all this is the outward manifestation of the messiness of human thought. The messiness cannot go into the program; it piles up around the programmer."

That's a beautiful description.

arocks• 14 years ago

A fun review. But if he had gone all the way and made the instructions come in Javascript + HTML5 then it would have actually waited for us to finish typing. Not to mention the non-linear narration possibilities.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

I'm getting this error:

    ReferenceError: Can't find variable: woopraTracker

When I basically do anything after

    s = new SummerReading()

CodeMage• 14 years ago

If you use Ghostery, pause blocking or whitelist Woopra.

A book review written in JavaScript

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