Thoughts on Code Year, Codecademy, and Learning to Code

By going one click away from this post you’ll see that I’ve spent the last twelve years writing books specifically geared to the newbie coder—be it someone who wants to learn the markup language of HTML, the style sheet language of CSS, the query language for relational database systems, the client-side programming language of JavaScript, or the server-side programming language of PHP (or, in fact, all of them together). As I wrote a few weeks ago, learning from tech books is not dead. But it’s not the only way to learn; straight up learning from a book doesn’t work for everyone, and certainly not every tech book pays attention to pedagogy (I do, with the help of all of my editors who keep me honest).

Then again, neither does every online learning environment. Do any?

Continue reading →

Tech Books: Not Dead!

As someone who has made a decent secondary income for the last twelve years writing technical books, a recent post in the SD Times caught my eye: “Are tech books dead?” it asks. The author comes to the conclusion that no, they’re not, although the rise of blogs and other online material certainly plays a role for learners more than it has in the past. I agree with this conclusion, which itself isn’t interesting, but that this is the conclusion still in 2011—almost 2012—is interesting to me (and it supports my desire to keep on writing books).

I started writing technical books in 1999; I wrote the second PHP-related book that came on the market (for Prima-Tech which became part of Course Technology which became part of Cenage, if you’re interested), and from that point on I was solicited to write some more, eventually writing only for Pearson and putting out an edition or two of something or another each year.

I never thought I’d still be doing this a decade later. As a developer myself, I knew how I learned new things in the ever-changing tech landscape, and it isn’t from technical books. I thought “who on earth would pick up a chunky ol’ book and sit it next to their computer while working on something?” … my choice of “thickbook.com” as my domain name was meant to be funny, like “here are Thick Books From Which You Shall Learn Things” (tongue firmly in cheek). The joke’s on me, because that income has increased or remained steady each year; there’s been no noticeable drop-off in either the number of sales of my books, the purchase of rights for translation, or the amount I’ve earned in royalties.

Continue reading →