[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...