Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution - O'Reilly Media. By Tim O'Reilly12/11/2002 The continuing controversy over online file sharing sparks me to offer a few thoughts as an author and publisher. To be sure, I write and publish neither movies nor music, but books. But I think that some of the lessons of my experience still apply. Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. Let me start with book publishing. More than 100,000 books are published each year, with several million books in print, yet fewer than 10,000 of those new books have any significant sales, and only a hundred thousand or so of all the books in print are carried in even the largest stores. Most books have a few months on the shelves of the major chains, and then wait in the darkness of warehouses from which they will move only to the recycling bin. Many works linger in deserved obscurity, but so many more suffer simply from the vast differential between supply and demand.
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation. John Fremlin's blog: frontpage. Code Simplicity » Essays. Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. Peter Norvig. Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. PaulGraham. Advice for Computer Science College Students. By Joel Spolsky Sunday, January 02, 2005 Despite the fact that it was only a year or two ago that I was blubbering about how rich Windows GUI clients were the wave of the future, college students nonetheless do occasionally email me asking for career advice, and since it's recruiting season, I thought I'd write up my standard advice which they can read, laugh at, and ignore.
Most college students, fortunately, are brash enough never to bother asking their elders for advice, which, in the field of computer science, is a good thing, because their elders are apt to say goofy, antediluvian things like "the demand for keypunch operators will exceed 100,000,000 by the year 2010" and "lisp careers are really very hot right now.
" I, too, have no idea what I'm talking about when I give advice to college students. I'm so hopelessly out of date that I can't really figure out AIM and still use (horrors!) Nevertheless. What was I talking about? Learn how to write before graduating. Part two: C. Next: Recommended Reading for Developers. Code Complete 2 Steve McConnell's Code Complete 2 is the Joy of Cooking for software developers. Reading it means that you enjoy your work, you're serious about what you do, and you want to keep improving. In Code Complete, Steve notes that the average programmer reads less than one technical book per year. The very act of reading this book already sets you apart from probably ninety percent of your fellow developers. In a good way. I like this book so much that the title of this very website is derived from it – the examples of what not to do are tagged with the "Coding Horror" icon.
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) Arguably the only classic book in our field. I challenge any developer to pick up a copy of The Mythical Man Month and not find this tale of a long-defunct OS, and the long-defunct team that developed it, startlingly relevant. Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability Er… yeah. Rapid Development Why?