[cheetos]

You should consider if there may be a good reason why he attracts so much hate.

I have found him to be contrarian and rude for the sake of being contrarian and rude.

To me, his behavior represents the worst of the archetypal 'rockstar' programmers I have worked with -- perhaps more skilled than the average, but full of himself, unreasonably mean and impossible to collaborate or work with. I have watched this kind of attitude destroy teams and companies and I prefer not to condone it.

There are plenty of people much more talented than him who are capable of providing feedback without seemingly delighting in being an asshole.

[sergiosgc]

We should be able to evaluate a book, a finished product, irrespective of its author. It is not acceptable to diss a body of work because the author is "contrarian and rude for the sake of being contrarian and rude". Either the book is good, or it isn't. It stands on its own.

I am a stranger to this feud, and knew nothing about Zed Shaw to this day. I have no chips in this discussion. The opinion I express is more of a generic attitude on life.

[dalke]

I see no reason to accept your strict view of aesthetic interpretation. Borge's 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' gives a perhaps exaggerated but definitely interesting example of how context can be relevant.

Consider the message "NUTS". It was a "legend of World War II" on the US side. (Quoting from https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XxAdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CJsE... .)

It clearly does not stand on its own. Without knowing the author, or the context, it's impossible to explain why that message resonated so deeply. (Eg, I seem to recall it being reappropriated in one of the early Star Trek novels.)

The message metadata gives some idea of the context:

   December 22, 1944
   To the German Commander,
     N U T S !
   The American Commander

and the larger situation is http://www.army.mil/article/92856 . Even then one wonders why General McAuliffe said "nuts" and not stronger invective. His Wikipedia entry says he was one of the few generals who did not use profane language, which lends some flavor to understanding that word choice.

If I write "NUTS" here, does it have the same meaning and interpretation as when McAuliffe wrote it some 70 years ago? Assuredly not.

[sergiosgc]

I meant it for the target book: A technical book, teaching a corpus of knowledge, designed to be complete. The comment I was replying to specifically targeted the author, implying that the end result could never be good. The inferred implication is not solid, specifically because the knowledge in the text does not require interpretation using knowledge about the author (or its environment).

A technical book, which condenses technical knowledge, has most of its content in the lines, not between them. There is no second reading of the book, there is no hidden meaning, there is no need for secondary information for interpretation of the text.

If you feel more comfortable viewing the subject under a reduction to the absurd lens, think about criticizing a published mathematical proof based on the opinions about the author's personality. The proof is either valid or invalid, and all the information needed to prove its validity must be contained in the proof (or it is invalid).

Your examples are not relevant, as they are not designed to be complete. The first is a view of an ancient text through a modern perspective, and the second is a fragment of a communication ensemble. A technical text, unlike these, is designed to be complete. I stand by my original position, although I was perhaps too broad in painting it. I didn't expect it to be read as extensible to literary texts.

[dalke]

Your text started "We should be able to evaluate a book" and ended "The opinion I express is more of a generic attitude on life.", which made me believe it was a general statement on all books, not on a limited subset. I think I can be excused for assuming it was a more encompassing attitude.

As for "designed to be complete", I don't know what that means in this context. Perhaps you mean stand-alone, as it does not depend on having access to other resources? Otherwise, the only definition I can come up with is tautological, as it covers everything the author meant it to cover. A technical book on "advanced differential equations" is not complete in that it assumes the reader already has a basic understanding of differential equations.

I have read many technical papers. They are still human documents. They can and often do contain meaning between the lines. I am reviewing some of the literature in my field from the 1960s, and it's easy to infer the social context. For a simple example, in most of the papers refer to a generic chemist as 'he' and clerical staff as 'she'. More subtly, there can be veiled attacks, like when one paper says "it's surprising that X and Y are connected" and then a paper a few years later says "as many of the people who founded X came out of Y, it's not surprising that there's a close connection between the two". It's not hard to read between the lines and infer that the second author is chiding the first author for not knowing the history.

More classically, in 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems' Galileo put the words of Urban VIII into the mouth of the character Simplico. The pope and many others interpreted that as a hidden attack on the pope, despite being a book on scientific ideas.

Have you never come across mathematical proofs written by kooks? The language, and frequent references to numerology and other occult philosophical traditions make it effectively impenetrable. Unfortunately, I can't find one easily. Visit your local math department and ask around - it's not uncommon. Sometimes much more sane versions of these get published, like http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf .

In any case, math proofs are supposed to be interesting. Otherwise we would just hook up a theorem prover to a journal publisher. If you look at the early papers in statistics, they use games of chance as examples. Sure, the proofs stand alone, but from the text you can also determine that gambling was not strictly taboo during that era.

BTW, I agree with the statement that none of Zed Shaw's internet persona is evident in this book. By all accounts, it is a good resource for learning how to program. In my cursory scan, I found no hidden or double meanings. However, that's a specific property of this book, I disagree that that's true of every arbitrarily chosen technical book.

[nosurf]

The context of your example story is specific to those people which validates what you are saying - it wouldn't make sense if you said "NUTS". But it isn't a relevant comparison. An antidotal documentation of an event is not a body of work. The body of work of a journalist would be measured differently than simply the subject of one event that they are asked to cover. There could be exceptions to the rule but I doubt many journalists hit it big and hang up the cleats.

A body of work around a certain subject that lots of people study and use in their professions is different. It should be judged without the author in mind, otherwise how are you going to remain neutral and form your own calculated reality of how it works when you review work by other authors?

[dalke]

Why should I remain neutral? We live in a sea of biases. I think it's better to know one's biases and consider how that affect what one wants to do, rather than remain neutral.

I've been watching archeology videos recently. The archeologists are not neutral on what how to interpret their finds. They use their non-neutral viewpoints to help guide where they work next. They are also well aware that the views of their profession have changed over time, and that those views can reflect implicit personal and cultural biases.

In this case I do not think Zed Shaw's personality outside of "Learn Python the Hard Way" affects the interpretation or use of that book. But I think Galileo was foolish for putting the words of the pope in the mouth of the character Simplicio and expect the pope and his supporters to remain neutral.

[knowtheory]

Keep on hatin'. Zed's just going to keep writing books that help people, and your impression of him will merely drown beneath the tides of people who benefit from all the work he's put into FOSS & teaching others.

I don't agree w/ Zed on everything, but i have benefitted from his work for literally a decade now: mongrel; his early writing on why programmers should learn statistics; his writings on the types of collaboration/projects programmers are involved in; Learn C The Hard Way; his various talks.

[ritchiea]

It's certainly possible to both be rude and write books that help people. The two behaviors are not mutually exclusive. I think it's completely reasonable to laud Zed for his efforts to teach while questioning his manner.

[knowtheory]

Except this is a post about his book and his teaching? But here we are dedicating all this time to rehashing all this stuff that happened years ago with people who obviously weren't there at the time.

[danellis]

Unless you have to work with him, why does his manner even matter?

[avinassh]

> his early writing on why programmers should learn statistics

A good read, here's the link for lazy - http://zedshaw.com/archive/programmers-need-to-learn-statist...

[jasonwocky]

> I have watched this kind of attitude destroy teams and companies and I prefer not to condone it.

Funnily enough, I actually knew Zed before he became "Zed" (we were both team leads for related organizations). He came off as one of the more caring and right-headed leads that I'd known at the time.

Things change of course (it's been years), but I wouldn't infer too much about what he'd do to a team from his internet persona.

[rimantas]

I suppose internet persona being very different from the real person also tells something about the person.

[danellis]

I've only had one dealing with him. While I was interviewing for a job with a company he was working at, they had him look at the code of one of my personal projects. He was polite and complimentary, just as you'd expect from anyone you were dealing with in a professional capacity.

I actually asked one of his colleagues what it was like working with him. Words like "quiet" and "pussy cat" were used. They said he has strong opinions, but is never contrary for the same if it, and is often just quietly sitting in a corner listening.

[bmj]

I find it interesting that many people go out of their to defend someone like Linus Torvalds, but with someone like Zed Shaw, go out of their to criticize Zed Shaw.

Sure, Linus has written and maintained an OS, but as others have pointed out, Zed's CV isn't too shabby, either.

[protomyth]

Its really pretty simple. Mr. Torvalds has a community and communities tend to defend their own. Happens in politics all the time because that's what humans do. Zed doesn't have as big a community and he offended some in the Ruby community. I think Zed's lecture in Toronto was an amazing presentation on values, but I've not read his books.

Its also why people say they "hate" a politician, leader, or band without listening to one word they say or believe snippets represent the whole of a person. The group think spreads quite nicely. At the end of it all, there is so much information and we have so little time, we outsource some of our beliefs. Comedians tend to use this to craft some jokes and sometimes abuse folks. For example, President Ford slipped a couple of times in slick shoes. Chevy Chase made him out to be a klutz and un-athletic on SNL to great merriment. President Ford was probably the most athletic President the US has had. He played linebacker in American Football and was consider a decent athlete.

My Dad was not a fan of this and did tend to scold his children that "if we were going to hate someone, we better damn well know why". I do admit to failing at this since there is so much, but it is a good lesson and tends to result in new joys.

[avn2109]

>> "I have found him to be contrarian and rude..."

There is a vital difference between "contrarian and rude" and "contrarian, rude, and right."

The latter doesn't erase the two former, but his code compiles and as far as I can tell his software works, which is at least worth mentioning.

Disclaimer: I don't have a horse in this race, know 0 of the principals involved, couldn't write FizzBuzz in Ruby, etc.

[celticninja]

when i used LPTHW I found him very helpful on the limited occasions i contacted him, LPTHW is also an excellent resource.

Dont judge a books value by your opinions of the author.

[zedshaw]

I am contrarian and rude, but you most likely worship quite a few people in tech who are also contrarian and rude but you say nothing. I bet there's a CEO you admire who is even worse than me and you tout his words like they're a gospel.

I personally would love nothing more than to have the industry flush everyone who behaves like that totally out of it, but as long as people like you hold those with no power to different standards than those with power, it'll never change.