Also some minor feedback: I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but obviously generated AI images give a lot of people 'the ick' so I'd recommend changing the cover (or modifying it).
I know this is just an early access, but it seems very underwhelming from the sample. This is all very basic Rust and the $35 price tag is not for an entry level book. You can literally read The Rust Book for free and it's more detailed.
So... why should I buy a $35 introductory programming book in 2024?
Here are some free introductory Rust books:
- The Rust Book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/
- Rust 101: https://www.ralfj.de/projects/rust-101/main.html
- Rust by Example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/
- Easy Rust: https://dhghomon.github.io/easy_rust/
- A Gentle Introduction to Rust: https://stevedonovan.github.io/rust-gentle-intro/
Although I typically show people Rustlings, because it teaches programming workflow.
What am I getting for $35 that isn't covered excellently for free already?
Here are some books I spent money on in the last 5 years:
- Functional Design and Architecture, by Alexander Granin
- Production Haskell, by Matt Parsons
- Thinking with Types, by Sandy Maguire
Being a seasoned developer, I would pay money for someone to fast-forward me through advanced concepts.
Here are some examples of free Rust books covering advanced examples:
- The Rustonomicon: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/nomicon/
- Rust Design Patterns: https://rust-unofficial.github.io/patterns/
- Effective Rust: https://www.lurklurk.org/effective-rust/
- Rust Atomics and Locks: https://marabos.nl/atomics/foreword.html
- The Little Book of Rust Macros: https://danielkeep.github.io/tlborm/book/index.html
- Burn: Deep Learning Framework: https://burn.dev/burn-book/
- API Development with Rust: https://rust-api.dev/docs/front-matter/preface/
- Rust Compiler Development Guide: https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/getting-started.html
I'd pay money for any of those. Not sure about an introductory book, considering the availability of good, free books.
They are great in each their way, but they're niche.
Production Haskell is for people who want to take their academic Haskell and turn it commercial. There's a lot of practical advice, both coding and non-coding.
Thinking with Types is a very good introduction to type-driven , but the later chapters assume very strong type systems (type-level functions, higher-kinded types, etc.) so you may not be able to apply this kind of modelling outside of Haskell, PureScript, Idris, LEAN, etc.
The book that translates best into any environment is Granin's Functional Architecture.
I can warmly recommend that one even if you're not venturing into FP as a whole.
I can't compare it to a whole lot of other software architecture books, though.
I also don't quite like it, although I'm not sure if it's for the same reasons as you. It's nothing so bad that I'd go out of my way to comment that it "really turned me off", so I'm curious what others think.
(In my case: it seems a little paid-by-the-word - the writer kind of goes around in circles, philosophizing and pontificating and asking rhetorical questions a bit too much.)
Hard to put a finger on, but it feels like they are trying to be clever, but forgot the clever part. I don't like being tricked while I read unless it challenges my thinking.
The samples are interesting, I wouldn't buy it (I just did the first few chapters of the rust book instead), but it seems cool. Get rid of the cover tho.
Hmm, hard to read on mobile (in portrait), had to zoom in a bit (but then text went out the window, so it was a bit of a balancing act)...
...so I rotate my phone.
DON'T DO THAT!
I'm directing that at both HN readers (you're welcome) and at the web author/admin (dude, TF?): a sudden explosion of additional content that I could not find a way to dismiss, when all I wanted to do was see the excerpts properly.
Seconding other comments re the poor quality crab, when your presentation is that poorly thought out and your prose that amateurish, it makes me want to save even more and dismiss this from my mind.
I'm sorry to be a little rude, but the AI-generated cover (the left crab is missing an eye, for starters) is a negative quality indicator. If you weren't willing to take the time to put together a thoughtful cover, why should readers expect the book's content to be assembled any more carefully?
A book's cover is a strong signal of its content and quality. You absolutely should judge books by their covers.
This isn't an accident. Publishers put a lot of effort into ensuring covers send accurate signals about the contents of the book. A book with a garbage cover didn't come through the modern publishing process, and it didn't get made by someone who cares enough about their book to put actual effort into the cover. The percentage of books that will be worthwhile with a bad cover is vanishingly small. To a first approximation, it's 0%.
It's very reasonable to judge a book by its cover these days. It's an intentional signal; covers aren't chosen at random. If you intend your book to be taken seriously, you need to keep up with modern standards.
It is pretty amusing, but I actually have to agree. Unless your book is about generative AI, using it for the cover makes me question the effort put into the rest of the book - which is really unfortunate if the author did in fact put a lot of effort into their book!
Yes, don’t judge a book by its cover - but lots of people do anyway.
Don't judge a book by the cover is an advice for us, the readers. It is NOT an advice for the writers or the marketing department.
a tasteful public domain image of a crab or something like hundreds of years old but then detailed enough kind of like one of those O'Reilly's books and then make the whole cover white with some text that stands out... It has all been done before and I anal but I doubt O'Reilly's can copyright or trademark that design feeling.
Edit: unless the authors are trying to crowd source the proof reading and peer review by releasing an early access copy? This cover draws attention from the average reader who is drawn to comment about the book because there is something to criticize? Maybe this is some kind of advanced 3D chess?
It's questionable advice for readers too. For example, if the cover of a book indicates it is a cheap romance novel, that is a pretty good indication that I won't have any interest in reading it.
I don’t think that making your book’s cover look indistinguishable from a significant number of other books in the same category is good marketing advice.
Choosing to make your book "fit" is often a good call. You're actually going to attract people who know roughly what they want. My mother reads a lot of trash romance, it's not very important who wrote it, but a handsome guy on the cover signals that this is roughly the right book, the attire and surroundings are a vague gesture at the sub-genre, guy in a white coat? Medical. Business suit? Maybe 1980s.
There's no rule against refusing to obey convention, "Twenty Jazz Funk Greats" is, in fact, not Jazz-funk, and indeed didn't have twenty tracks. But nobody working on that album thought "This is a commercial route to success". It's art. Really difficult to listen to art. If you are not making art but have some other purpose you probably do want to signal your intent to people merely browsing.
But before picking any of these or other images from the Library of Congress, check the "about this item" link and see in particular the "Rights Advisory", including any links to further details about rights and usage in that field, and keep also in mind things like what is pointed out in one of those links; "Privacy and publicity rights may also apply". IANAL, TINLA.
If it was a particularly bad stock image, I would. The only reason I even noticed here is because the image is bizarre and uncanny if you look at it for even a moment.
If the AI produced something indistinguishable from a good stock photo, then no, I would probably not have noticed. But it didn’t, and they still put it on top of their hard work. If the AI image sucks, don’t use it!
I disagree, this is actually a great use case for generative AI. There are many people who are great at writing, coding, hacking, or other talents, but are terrible artists. I know that I fall into this category, and I’m very excited about the prospect of using AI for any graphical assets I need for my projects.
Especially with an ebook, if the content is good, I frankly don’t even care if it even has a cover at all.
I understand, but you should understand that OP's response will be common to your use of AI graphics: it'll be an indicator of little thought or quality control put into it.
As an independent developer or author, every bit of time or money put into superficial things like a book cover is time or money that isn’t used for the content itself.
A comment like this makes a lot of subtle assumptions.
That there's a fixed budget of time/money - exactly X hours/dollars will be allocated to the book, one way or another.
That the improvement to the quality of the content as time/money is invested is something approaching linear - that if exactly X hours/dollars are going to be allocated to the book, the content will be appreciably better if, say, 0.9X is allocated to the content vs, say, 0.8X.
That time and money is fungible: that all time/money that could be invested in the content could be invested in superficial things, and the other way around.
Yeah, i agree that, on principle, generative AI should be a good got for these kinds of things. But, the results are... idk, uncanny. At least to me.
For example, if you were to ask a human artist to draw this image with two crabs, and this artist didn't know how many legs crabs have, what would they do? I think they'd probably google how many legs crabs have, and how they look in general, and at the very least draw two crabs with the same amount of legs.
But these generative models don't know how many legs crabs have, and they are not clever enough to ask, or even count it seems. So you end up with results like these. The main crab has 8 legs (6 + 2 claws), while the little one seemingly has 10 (or at least it has 5 on one side), and it's also missing an eye for some reason.
A human artist can also make mistakes, for sure. But i don't think these kind of mistakes would be expected from an artist.
And i agree with the other commenters that said this reflects poorly on the author of the book. Didn't they care to check the cover for obvious mistakes? Attention to detail is a very important trait on a technical writer.
Agreed. Whatever you might think of GenAI, using it poorly speaks to a fundamental lack of attention to detail.
Even worse, it makes me question the content itself. If they used Stable Diffusion for the cover image, who's to say they didn't also use an LLM to generate some of the Rust examples in the book itself?
Note: I'm not suggesting that the inherent usage of an LLM to generate Rust code is necessarily bad. What I am suggesting is that they might approach the review of said generated code with the same laissez-faire attitude as they did with the cover image.
Congrats on the new book!
Also some minor feedback: I know you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but obviously generated AI images give a lot of people 'the ick' so I'd recommend changing the cover (or modifying it).
I know this is just an early access, but it seems very underwhelming from the sample. This is all very basic Rust and the $35 price tag is not for an entry level book. You can literally read The Rust Book for free and it's more detailed.
Yes, I'm also curious about who the audience is.
I hold monthly Rust hack nights, and occasionally the theme is beginner-friendly.
I usually point them to Rustlings, and participants are having a great time.
For teaching a class in Rust, I'd prefer a free book.
The Rust Book currently advertises an experimental fork of the book:
https://rust-book.cs.brown.edu/
It features some opt-in anonymised datamining for improving the book.
What more am I getting for $35 than Rustlings and Rust Book?
So... why should I buy a $35 introductory programming book in 2024?
Here are some free introductory Rust books:
Although I typically show people Rustlings, because it teaches programming workflow.What am I getting for $35 that isn't covered excellently for free already?
Here are some books I spent money on in the last 5 years:
Being a seasoned developer, I would pay money for someone to fast-forward me through advanced concepts.Here are some examples of free Rust books covering advanced examples:
I'd pay money for any of those. Not sure about an introductory book, considering the availability of good, free books.> Here are some books I spent money on in the last 5 years
Would you recommend these books?
They are great in each their way, but they're niche.
Production Haskell is for people who want to take their academic Haskell and turn it commercial. There's a lot of practical advice, both coding and non-coding.
Thinking with Types is a very good introduction to type-driven , but the later chapters assume very strong type systems (type-level functions, higher-kinded types, etc.) so you may not be able to apply this kind of modelling outside of Haskell, PureScript, Idris, LEAN, etc.
The book that translates best into any environment is Granin's Functional Architecture.
I can warmly recommend that one even if you're not venturing into FP as a whole.
I can't compare it to a whole lot of other software architecture books, though.
Why would you even think of buying an introductory book if you are a seasoned dev?
ngl, the prose around the hello world example at the start really turned me off to this $35 resource.
Could you elaborate a little bit?
I also don't quite like it, although I'm not sure if it's for the same reasons as you. It's nothing so bad that I'd go out of my way to comment that it "really turned me off", so I'm curious what others think.
(In my case: it seems a little paid-by-the-word - the writer kind of goes around in circles, philosophizing and pontificating and asking rhetorical questions a bit too much.)
Hard to put a finger on, but it feels like they are trying to be clever, but forgot the clever part. I don't like being tricked while I read unless it challenges my thinking.
I'm sorry if this is overly critical.
The samples are interesting, I wouldn't buy it (I just did the first few chapters of the rust book instead), but it seems cool. Get rid of the cover tho.
Hmm, hard to read on mobile (in portrait), had to zoom in a bit (but then text went out the window, so it was a bit of a balancing act)...
...so I rotate my phone.
DON'T DO THAT!
I'm directing that at both HN readers (you're welcome) and at the web author/admin (dude, TF?): a sudden explosion of additional content that I could not find a way to dismiss, when all I wanted to do was see the excerpts properly.
Seconding other comments re the poor quality crab, when your presentation is that poorly thought out and your prose that amateurish, it makes me want to save even more and dismiss this from my mind.
So thank you? I think?
> This is amusingly known as bebugging
I have never heard of this (though Wikipedia does say it was called that in the 70s).
I think this would actually be called "mutation testing".
Can you please give regional pricing to SEA? It really helps with providing access to a larger audience!
I’m not the author but which SEA are you referring to? Southeast Asia? Southeast Africa? I assume you’re not talking about Seattle.
It’s important to be specific when you’re trying to localize things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_(disambiguation)
Well according to steam it's South East Asia
I'm sorry to be a little rude, but the AI-generated cover (the left crab is missing an eye, for starters) is a negative quality indicator. If you weren't willing to take the time to put together a thoughtful cover, why should readers expect the book's content to be assembled any more carefully?
I love how the top comment is a guy literally judging a book by it's cover.
A book's cover is a strong signal of its content and quality. You absolutely should judge books by their covers.
This isn't an accident. Publishers put a lot of effort into ensuring covers send accurate signals about the contents of the book. A book with a garbage cover didn't come through the modern publishing process, and it didn't get made by someone who cares enough about their book to put actual effort into the cover. The percentage of books that will be worthwhile with a bad cover is vanishingly small. To a first approximation, it's 0%.
It's very reasonable to judge a book by its cover these days. It's an intentional signal; covers aren't chosen at random. If you intend your book to be taken seriously, you need to keep up with modern standards.
No serious readers judge a book by the cover.
That's absolutely false, but thanks for contributing.
It is pretty amusing, but I actually have to agree. Unless your book is about generative AI, using it for the cover makes me question the effort put into the rest of the book - which is really unfortunate if the author did in fact put a lot of effort into their book!
Yes, don’t judge a book by its cover - but lots of people do anyway.
Don't judge a book by the cover is an advice for us, the readers. It is NOT an advice for the writers or the marketing department.
a tasteful public domain image of a crab or something like hundreds of years old but then detailed enough kind of like one of those O'Reilly's books and then make the whole cover white with some text that stands out... It has all been done before and I anal but I doubt O'Reilly's can copyright or trademark that design feeling.
Edit: unless the authors are trying to crowd source the proof reading and peer review by releasing an early access copy? This cover draws attention from the average reader who is drawn to comment about the book because there is something to criticize? Maybe this is some kind of advanced 3D chess?
It's questionable advice for readers too. For example, if the cover of a book indicates it is a cheap romance novel, that is a pretty good indication that I won't have any interest in reading it.
The saying itself is from a time before many books had such descriptive covers.
I don’t think that making your book’s cover look indistinguishable from a significant number of other books in the same category is good marketing advice.
Who said "indistinguishable" ?
Choosing to make your book "fit" is often a good call. You're actually going to attract people who know roughly what they want. My mother reads a lot of trash romance, it's not very important who wrote it, but a handsome guy on the cover signals that this is roughly the right book, the attire and surroundings are a vague gesture at the sub-genre, guy in a white coat? Medical. Business suit? Maybe 1980s.
There's no rule against refusing to obey convention, "Twenty Jazz Funk Greats" is, in fact, not Jazz-funk, and indeed didn't have twenty tracks. But nobody working on that album thought "This is a commercial route to success". It's art. Really difficult to listen to art. If you are not making art but have some other purpose you probably do want to signal your intent to people merely browsing.
You could even take the "public domain image" idea and still make something that looks nothing like an O'Reilly book.
For example, here are some images from Library of Congress with crabs in them that I think could make for interesting book covers:
- https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8a23704/ "Residents of Raceland, Louisiana, eating crabs at crab boil" (1938 Sept.)
- https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/jpd.00748/ "Benkeigani to tsubaki" (between 1825 and 1830)
- https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.69838/ "Frozen crabs at a restaurant" (January 1954)
- https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/highsm.14204/ "The Barking Crab restaurant on the Fan Pier across the Northern Bridge from downtown Boston, Massachusetts" (between 1980 and 2006)
- https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ds.00242/ "Cancer" (latin name for crab, you'll probably want to edit the image to avoid any unfortunate connotations) (1825)
But before picking any of these or other images from the Library of Congress, check the "about this item" link and see in particular the "Rights Advisory", including any links to further details about rights and usage in that field, and keep also in mind things like what is pointed out in one of those links; "Privacy and publicity rights may also apply". IANAL, TINLA.
It also might be a sign that the content of the book is itself AI generated.
Oh please. Don't pretend like this has anything to do with "effort". If the book cover was some generic stock image you wouldn't even blink.
If it was a particularly bad stock image, I would. The only reason I even noticed here is because the image is bizarre and uncanny if you look at it for even a moment.
If the AI produced something indistinguishable from a good stock photo, then no, I would probably not have noticed. But it didn’t, and they still put it on top of their hard work. If the AI image sucks, don’t use it!
I disagree, this is actually a great use case for generative AI. There are many people who are great at writing, coding, hacking, or other talents, but are terrible artists. I know that I fall into this category, and I’m very excited about the prospect of using AI for any graphical assets I need for my projects.
Especially with an ebook, if the content is good, I frankly don’t even care if it even has a cover at all.
I understand, but you should understand that OP's response will be common to your use of AI graphics: it'll be an indicator of little thought or quality control put into it.
As an independent developer or author, every bit of time or money put into superficial things like a book cover is time or money that isn’t used for the content itself.
A comment like this makes a lot of subtle assumptions.
That there's a fixed budget of time/money - exactly X hours/dollars will be allocated to the book, one way or another.
That the improvement to the quality of the content as time/money is invested is something approaching linear - that if exactly X hours/dollars are going to be allocated to the book, the content will be appreciably better if, say, 0.9X is allocated to the content vs, say, 0.8X.
That time and money is fungible: that all time/money that could be invested in the content could be invested in superficial things, and the other way around.
"That there's a fixed budget of time/money"
As independent developer.
Yes, time is fixed. There is only 24 hours in a day.
A pleasant color and a pleasing font good a long way. You can spend very little time and no money.
You have direct evidence above that the book cover is not a superficial thing. If you don't take this into account, then you're not a serious author.
which begs the question: why spend any time at all including an ai image as part of the cover if it’s a negative signal for some people?
Stock art exists. Still may require some taste in editor, but it's hard to do worse than bad AI art.
Yeah, i agree that, on principle, generative AI should be a good got for these kinds of things. But, the results are... idk, uncanny. At least to me.
For example, if you were to ask a human artist to draw this image with two crabs, and this artist didn't know how many legs crabs have, what would they do? I think they'd probably google how many legs crabs have, and how they look in general, and at the very least draw two crabs with the same amount of legs.
But these generative models don't know how many legs crabs have, and they are not clever enough to ask, or even count it seems. So you end up with results like these. The main crab has 8 legs (6 + 2 claws), while the little one seemingly has 10 (or at least it has 5 on one side), and it's also missing an eye for some reason.
A human artist can also make mistakes, for sure. But i don't think these kind of mistakes would be expected from an artist.
And i agree with the other commenters that said this reflects poorly on the author of the book. Didn't they care to check the cover for obvious mistakes? Attention to detail is a very important trait on a technical writer.
No image is better than an AI image. It’s demeaning to your work.
Judging books by their covers is underrated.
In sociology most of the results that actually replicate are the ones that are true but people wish they weren't.
Agreed. Whatever you might think of GenAI, using it poorly speaks to a fundamental lack of attention to detail.
Even worse, it makes me question the content itself. If they used Stable Diffusion for the cover image, who's to say they didn't also use an LLM to generate some of the Rust examples in the book itself?
Note: I'm not suggesting that the inherent usage of an LLM to generate Rust code is necessarily bad. What I am suggesting is that they might approach the review of said generated code with the same laissez-faire attitude as they did with the cover image.
Are we sure that the crab missing the left-eye wasn't on purpose? Some meme about bugs or something.
It seem to also be missing left legs, as if it was damaged.
The book seems focused on errors and error handling, maybe a 'bug' on the cover was on purpose.
Not so sure this is just AI artifact.
It is 100% a badly generated AI image. The random partial keyboards are a dead giveaway along with the smeared looking green text on the monitor.
who cares?
apparently a lot of commenters care.
a huge amount of the comments on the book were critical just because of the cover.