Justin Rogers

It's tough to put a finger on Mr. Nilges. He's certainly a strange one. A quick look around the net shows him to be a strident supporter of his own book and his way of thinking. First there was his own review on Amazon, then this thread, which includes references to the FBI, conspiracy theories, sabbaticals, and dysfunctional America (he also takes to task the bad reviews on Amazon):

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=f5dda427.0406060353.4c7e37ea%40posting.google.com

I haven't read his book, but have seen reviews ranging from terrible (most) to great (some). There seems to be nothing in between. For instance, here's Bill Ryan's glowing review (he likens it to Dante's Inferno):

http://msmvps.com/williamryan/archive/2004/09/15/13576.aspx

I appreciate you posting your review, and can't fathom the nerve of an author suggesting you remove it and apologize. It's just incomprehensible. I suppose that behavior alone will be sufficient to prevent me buying a copy.

I must say that I rarely if ever even crack open the CD's that come with books.

I saw the Trackback and followed it over here. It's a shame things got so heated because I've gotten to know Edward recently and I think he's a great guy.

Let me explain a little why I wrote the review as I did. First and foremost, I was being honest. I wasn't looking for a book on Compiler theory per se, but I wanted to learn how to write my own language in .NET in hopes of learning more about it. Me and two of my co-workers wrote a product called .NET Refactor (www.knowdotnet.com) and it was a chore. If I'd have had this book back then, it would have been much easier to write .NET REfactor and the next version has been redone using a lot of what was in Edward's book.

I have read a LOT of .NET books and continue to - In addition I read a good amount of CS stuff but for the time being, my focus has been on .NET. Edward's book has a lot of sidebar stuff that IMHO, just begs you to start thinking about other issues. I'm not saying it was the case with this book, but I think it's entirely possible to have a book stimulate the thought process in areas that aren't within the domain of the subject matter and still qualify as a great book. This book got me thinking about a lot of different areas and caused me to rethink a lot of stuff that I previously took for granted. Personally, I think the quotes that he uses in there justify the book's price but I can certainly understand how people would disagree with me. I lent the book to two other people and for what it's worth, they shared my feelings about it.

I admire your honesty in the fact that if you don't like something you aren't afraid to say so. If I don't like a book, I simply don't write about it. You'll notice for instance that although I've reviewed well over 40 .NET books in miscellaneous venues, that I don't have one review on an OReilly book. The reason for this is stated above - but in the same vien, I understand that a Lot of people really like their stuff. One time I was somewhat critical of a .NET book (by a Publisher that I'm quite fond of) and the response was met with hostility that was an order of magnitude than anything Edward wrote. As a matter of fact, the person took to personal insults which if anything, only reinforced my comments. I basically wrote that while the book was technically correct, the author came off like a condescending jerk and didn't back up the attitude with content.
Anyway, it's just a personal thing but I respect the fact you write about both sides.

I never knew Edward before I wrote the review but since then I've spoken with him many times. If you read through my blog - you'll see that we've jousted many times over a whole variety of issues. Edward is a passionate about many things and I think that's reflected in his comments. If you read the link above on google - you'll see that that one got pretty heated. To that end though, I do know that there was a deliberate effort by a few people to bad mouth his book because of some old grudges. I think that's probably largely responsible for why he responded rather strongly to the negative criticism.

A while ago when I was in Redmond, I had the honor of hanging out with Mike Hernandez of Database Design for Mere Mortals fame. I'm probably Mike's biggest fan and he's got to be one of the coolest, most down to earth people I've ever met. So after a few beers we were discussing the response to his book - which is almost 100% Overwhelmingly positive. But he told me that it took a while to get used to writing books b/c he took some of the criticism's personally. One comment titled "Database design for Mental Midgets" was particularly harsh and bothered him - not in the sense of anger but just that someone didn't like something he put so much into. Another pretty famous author told him to get used to it, it's part of the game. He said when he came to that realization, then it got a lot easier. You 'know' that you should not take things personally, but when something takes as much time as a book does, it's hard to do for many folks, particularly the first time or two.

Hi, Bill.

I would not have replied to a negative review written by someone who'd at a minimum read the book. This is Book Reviewing 101. You don't pretend to have an opinion until you have finished the book.

So it's not a matter of me being a passionate, sensitive, kind of guy, although I am.

To me, the judgement "not everyone can write a book" sounds like one of those terribly final, terribly "reified" (cast in concrete) form of Human Resources explanations used to justify what usually turns out, on investigation, somebody else's failure to do their homework.

The language has flavor, all its own. It can never be analyzed or subject to any kind of deconstruction because it is post facto and essentially, people "sign off" on it just to get the agonizing process, of encountering a normalized deviance (a deviance accepted as OK for social peace), over.

Personally, I have been told over the course of my 55 years, sometimes by the same person, gee, Ed, you kin write and you oughta write a book, and gee, Ed, you can't write worth jack. The message seems to be that what's most useful are my speling and gramer skilz and that I should seek a career as a ghostwriter or flack rather than attempting to say what's on me mind.

This may be because our society splits the "suits" and the geeks, and the "suits" tech and cognitive skills atrophy, rendering them absolutely reliant on the geeks to justify what is at times unjustifiable, whether it's France's behavior in the Cote d'Ivoire or America's in Iraq (how's that for Fair and Balanced?)

Meaning the suits need press releases and code but can't produce them. Meantime, many geeks, both left and right, question the entire set-up and ask why it is necessary (on the left) for so many people to work for peanuts or on the right to disallow people free choice.

Another message is social schizophrenia, as evinced on the political scene. Hell, even Bush's supporters know he's a bozo (William F. Buckley is antiwar). At the same time, they remained silent so's Kerry wouldn't get elected and open a can of worms, such as the systematic racism of our society, and the fact that gay men are lonely and would like to marry each other rather than hang out in bars. One is familiar with the Rush Limbaugh listener who professes to "hate" Rush.

All this leads me to believe that there is an element here of killing the messenger, although, to be fair, the reviewer here ain't schizophrenic about me. He dislikes me insofar as he knows me and on further acquaintance may dislike me even more. Boo hoo. I think I got over it already.

I have some "negatives" with my own book, and as I stated in the Amazon self-review, I did the best job in the time available.

There is a profound truth somewhere in that simple statement. The real artist, like Michelangelo, makes an end when he is finished, and the work dictates the time taken. But even in the time of Pope Julius and especially now, creative work, unless you fund it yourself as your own entrepreneur, is universally "factored" into chunks of undifferentiated and unskilled labor, and then budgeted with deadlines.

This is also called "reality", although guys like Marx said, "oh yeah" and "sez who", and CONSERVATIVES from G. K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, to Russell Kirk, have ALSO said "sez who"...as does the average Joe when the car doesn't start, the health insurance runs out, or the Cubs lose.

The Apress constraints were quite loose as compared with a typical Death March development project and in fact I delivered far more code than most computer books deliver, code that can be used commercially to create a business rules or macro facility in a shrink wrap product. I'm not going to get a dime from that, of course. Boo, again, hoo.

Nonetheless, Apress has bills to pay and May 2004 was cast in concrete. It can be said that the deadlines kept the book simple and accessible because while this reviewer disdains it (because he's written, ahem, a calc.exe) many other programmers may find it useful.

Since I've coded a compiler generator and pieces of a regex, I would have liked very much to include chapters on both. The problems are that (1) two new chapters would have blown the planned page budget and (2) understanding both products require an acquaintance with set theory, which would demand I add ANOTHER chapter on sets and logic!

Furthermore, my tech editor, Dan Appleman, would have redlined the material because he was editing from the standpoint of the average, good programmer.

Dan is a programming Democrat. He seems from my personal acquaintance to be a younger version of Peter Neumann, the (politically rather liberal) moderator of comp.risks, although I do not know Dan's politics. In computing terms, it appears that Dan's love of explaining things is like mine because, I think, both of us know you don't "know" until you pass it on.

And as a programming Democrat, Dan is a firm believer in the Rights of Computer Languages to liberty, equality and fraternity, especially in .Net.

When I was working last year in Silicon Valley, I had a C# job and was interested in writing a C# version of my compiler, but Dan pitched a fit, both because I was late, and, I think, he wanted to show the world that high quality, compiler code could be written in grubby old VB.

And when I reflected on the struggles of students of color at DeVry to get jobs having learned primarily VB, I was in sympathy with Dan.

Programming skill in fact has very little to do with choice of languages, a choice often dictated by the boss, and the idea that it does is a confusion between the stars and the telescope (as in the aphorism of Dijkstra I quote).

I regard the foregrounding of language choice over knowledge of the applied mathematics as a crypto racist and classist venture.

As to politics. It's been said that the "default" politics of computer people is libertarianism, "let us alone", coupled with dislike of unions and welfare and support for free trade. The only view I share is a support of free trade: as to outsourcing, let it rip: I outsourced myself last year to Fiji and this year to China.

But it seems we have trouble admitting that as mere coders we make the System work in what to me is an opaque way, where, for example, people are judged by Fair-Isaacs "single number" credit scoring in place of business rules and have no appeal. Or where no audit trail exists in an election and the programmer who suggests to a boss with a criminal record that we might apply some business rules (totalVotes <= votesFor Bush) is terminated under employment "at-will".

Another thing I'd do differently is sharply cut back on the digressions in the book, and increase the focus more. Basically, I took my lecture style, which the chair of MIS programmes at DeVry admired, and put it on paper.

But on paper, it is at times just a pain.

At one point in the tech edit, I'd written in the Word document "But, I digress". Dan A commented "yeah, you digress".

With all these links in this blog to conservative sites, I realize I am behind enemy lines. But let us not speak falsely now the hour is much too late.

Criticism, especially by people who do due diligence, doesn't bother me. The reason I spoke up in this blog was an apparent failure to meet the elementary responsibility of a book reviewer. And the connection to politics is inescapable, because the Bush "mandate" means that as regards international politics, the dog ate the homework and that's jest fine.

Two expressions come to mind here:

1. The lady protesteth too much.

2. When in hole, stop digging.

Justin's review made me think "perhaps that book isn't for me". Edward's tortured political rants confirmed it.

Edward, just a quick question... do you wear aluminium foil around your head so that 'they' can't use their satellites to read your mind?

You could read my response as superficially as Justin read my book and still get the essence.

This is that Justin reviewed the book after an hour's perusal and skim, and thought it had a CD, which means he wasn't qualified to review, especially if he is being paid for referrals. If he is being paid for referrals then his conduct constitutes malpractice in his chosen profession.

I hope the above is quite brief enough even for the dyslexic. The dyslexic may skip the rest if it makes their head hurt.

As to the objections based on word count. Part of the problem is that too many programmers are so poleaxed by reification that they actually think they're being smart when instead of addressing a case point by point they make reference to word count, which today can be determined by automatic means.

Logic 101, people: reference to prolixity is at best stylistic, not an argument.

Justin's further "deep" analysis consisted in going to Apress, downloading the code, and then, apparently, noticing that form1 in the qbGUI project has a lotta lines, so he's still in the reified mode of assuming that prolixity, in and of itself, is a Bad Thing (an incoherent stance because initially he felt that prolixity in prose was missing in the book, also, inconsistently, a Bad Thing).

Of course, the project name indicates the goal of the project and form1 is consistently the main form, a standard clear, in the structural sense, by means of being consistently followed. An alternative would be to name the form after the project, of course. Fairly trivial.

"Hey, Harv, are you into TRIVIA?" "I'm talkin' to ya, ain't I?" - Harvey Pekar, American Splendor

The main problem is that book "reviewers", who are apparently semipro based on the references to referral fees, don't know how to maintain critical distance while, at a minimum in this case, reading the book in its entirety, without having to be told to do so by the author...and in the case of a computer book or math book, working through most of the examples!

For illumination, take a look at my reviews on Amazon such as a review of Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals.

I think Posner is a dope and Public Intellectuals confirmed my view, because Posner assumed without argument that Public Intellectuals should be considered jest folks, and held to Wal-Mart style productivity standards, in which they'd produce a certain rate of True Ideas in defense of the Status Quo, rather than bitch and whine in cafes.

However, I read the book attentively from cover to cover, and if Posner had embedded a CD with pictures of Public Intellectuals in compromising positions, I woulda downloaded same. Only then did I feel qualified (as Amazon requires) to review the book.

I sense that today entirely too many people will read a book or even sit through a TV program only based on an initial liking for the author, producers, or viewpoint to be expressed.

Reading critically is a difficult skill, because at one and the same time you have to understand and form objections. Nonetheless, because Justin is a smart guy, I am certain he could have done so while running the code and watching the pretty pictures.

He could then have posted "I am unconvinced by Nilges' approach and the guy is a total bozo, because his compiler doesn't do proper error checking, for which one needs to use a parser generator. Furthermore, the guy needs his head examined on 'business rules' since allowing the credit scorer to CHANGE the rules is asking for her to get kickbacks from the debtor."

These are two valid objections which I believe I can address, but it's not appropriate to do so here. The point is that they are based on critical reading, something discouraged, I think, both by the conditions of many programming jobs and Fox News.

Justin, on the other hand, seems to feel that one can just sort of paw through books at Borders and make reviews based on a superficial examination.

I read a number of math and computer books but rarely review them, simply because I don't feel qualified to review, whether negatively or positively, until I've worked through most of the examples.

But apparently, when some sort of money or referral fees are involved, some people feel no such compunction.

Finally, the reference to tinfoil hats is a common enough meme which encapsulates for the most part the fear of a genuine epistemological isolation which is imposed, in the American gulag of the streets, on any number of people who fail to toe the mark, and who are damaged by the experience.

But this particular meme is dissolved, like a ghost at cock-crow, by one and only one link from the tinhat person to a community...a network. For me, this is any single reader who like Bill found the book useful.

My boss at Princeton assigned me to work with John Nash at a difficult moment in Nash's recovery precisely because the women programmers were frightened by Nash, and I played a small part in linking Nash to a community. So whenever I hear arguments couched in phrases of adolescent teasing, I reflect that they usually say more about the source, as does this self-revealing anonymous coward.

Yeah, maybe the Martians (who are as we know from Mars) are paying American right-wingers to conduct a systematic campaign of harassment against lil ole me for having the nerve to be an ace programmer while retaining left wing views, using X rays from which I need to protect myself.

Or, maybe, Saddam Husayn had WMDs and also flying monkeys in a hidden palace, and maybe the recent election was Fair and Balanced.

Or something. I suggest that if one SYSTEMATICALLY paws through the shelves at Borders while looking for books to nail, or if one counts words before reading, then of course ignorance replaces knowledge, and "everything is possible and nothing is true".

Sorry, fellas. I'm right, and Justin is wrong. I shall check this site once more for a retraction in a few days in order to avoid clutter, but post no more.

My email is spinoza1111@yahoo.com. If ya need to Get Started on a .Net project that involves parsing, and ya didn't take no Compiler Development class in school, give my book a whack. If youse is a teacher with a class of ruffians who blanch at the prospect of using the Dragon book without prep, assign my book (yeah, baby, 30 copies!!)

But if like Justin, you are having a bad hair day and that cute barista at Border's turned ya down, please engage brain before "reviewing".

If at first you don't succeed...

Imagine this scene:

Justin is an expert in the weewaa technology. He spends some time leafing through a book on applying weewaas to dingdongs. He decides it's rubbish and not worth buying. He tells his friends about it in the hope they won't waste their money. He reads lots of books. He's done this before. So have they. Not a controversial scenario.

Cue Monty Python for scene two:

The author of said book walks into the bookstore and tells Justin he is wrong, wrong, wrong about the book, and that it's slanderous that he should tell any of his friends it's not worth buying, because he's not qualified to make any judgement, and because Fox News Is Bad. From there he launches into an escalating series of shrill, long-winded, pretentious, ad-hominem rants, which seem motivated more by an attempt to justify his worth as a human being than to address the quoted flaws in his book. The occasional drop of fashionable philosophical nonsense serves for a while to distract everybody from asking the obvious questions: What the fuck is this psycho doing here? Did he really just say "But let us not speak falsely now the hour is much too late"??? Are we being Punked?

But let me not tarry here, forsooth. Edward: You are behaving exactly as your worst enemy would if he wished to discredit your professional reputation. Think about it.

What if Ed's worst enemy is the one posting here, pretending to be Ed? :-D

^_^,Pretty Good!

hi all

Honestly, I think even our good reviewers could be more consistently specific Cheney did a spectacular job on Kelly Link but then didn't explain without abstractions why certain first lines worked while others didn't. If we criticize something, we ought to have a reason why. If you hate a politician, I don't give a damn how colorful your expletives are. Tell me why. Did a critic write something you didn't like? Do you think he's pretentious or fascist trying to supress your precious ideas? Explain why. Give evidence. If you don't, you're the fascist trying to supress ideas different from your own (as Non-Sequitor so eloquently put it).

Pingback from  Publishing: Good reviews, bad reviews, and hurting oooh so many feelings.

If you hate a politician, I don't give a damn how colorful your expletives are. Tell me why. Did a critic write something you didn't like? Do you think he's pretentious or fascist trying to supress your precious ideas? Explain why. Give evidence. If you don't, you're the fascist trying to supress ideas different from your own (as Non-Sequitor so eloquently put it).

What if Ed's worst enemy is the one posting here, pretending to be Ed? :-D

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I get sick and tired of people screaming that I don't know them, that I couldn't possibly understand where they're coming from.  That I can't *judge* them or anything they do because I'm not them.

Screw that.  I've got good sense and the right to use it.

Seeing an author recoil at negative reviews because the reader didn't read every single word on every page is ridiculous.  If the food's spoiled, you don't have to eat every last bite to say so.

There are more good books than you'll ever have the time to read.  And at least twice as many bad ones.  If a book can't keep my interest after an hour or two of perusal in a subject which I enjoy, than it certainly isn't worth a further investment of time or money.  We have lives, apparently.

Painting your critics as villains, idiots and vagrants because they don't value your contribution stinks of hypocrisy.  You can't judge them, after all, unless you've read everything they've written, right?  Twice over?

Nevermind, just accuse them of being in league with Bush and everyone else who's unpopular at the moment.  That'll get people to side with you.  Who needs a valid, applicable argument?  Obviously everyone who thinks differently is ignorant, voted for Bush and hates minorities and science, right?

Seriously, I was interested in the subject, but I won't buy anything from a self-righteous peddler who has the gall to mistreat anyone who thinks differently.  My baseless opinions are just as good as your own.  I don't need a degree in ass-hattery to act like one.  Nor do you, apparently.

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In spite of my english trouale,I am trying to read and understand your writing.

And ı am following frequently.I hope that you will be with us together with much more scharings.

I hope that your success will go on.

thnks really show is good The majority of climate scientists agree and non climate scientists are perfectly capable of assessing the science their colleagues produce and formulating educated hard nosed fact based statements regarding the threats that face us. In some cases that is their science, their job. One such scientist is David M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist from NASA Langley Research Center, who stated we could see temperature increases of 12º to 14ºC by 2100 if the positive feedback loops currently kicking in, not included in the last IPCC reports, aren't brought to a halt. This would mean sea level rises of 75 to 80 meters by 2100 which would submerge the current living area of 2.4 billion people. He states that we need to replace 80% the fossil carbon based energy we use with algae, halophytes, and cyanobacteria sourced biofuels grown on unused land, he calls it deserts and wasteland, with sea water. This would need to be accompanied by massive increases in conservation and huge deployment of drill geothermal, wind and solar capacity.

Absolutely Breath taking! not just the boobs ;)

Build on it, forget about it, discount it, do whatever you must, but don't whine and use political bullshit to try and get me to take my criticisms down.

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