[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.