Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!sgi!daisy!klee
From: klee@daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: O'Reilly X Books
Message-ID: <1625@daisy.UUCP>
Date: 14 Sep 88 22:27:31 GMT
References: <469@pan.UUCP> <137@tityus.UUCP>
Reply-To: klee@daisy.UUCP (Ken Lee)
Organization: Daisy Systems Corp., Mountain View, Ca.
Lines: 46

In article <137@tityus.UUCP> jim@athsys.uucp (Jim Becker) writes:
>	I just received my updates to the O'Reilly books, and they appear
>to be a top notch job, especially considering the infancy of X windows.
>They are professional in nature, yet guide the reader through the material
>in an interesting way. I find them to be well laid out and information rich,
>and would be hard pressed to program for X windows without them.
>	Although more detailed and better books will inevitably follow, they
>have done an amazing job in the short amount of time they have had to create
>a comprehensive guide to understanding and programming X windows.

This is beginning to sound like an advertisement.  My impression is 
somewhat different.  I have the O'Reilly books for X11R1 and X11R2.
I've heard that an X11R3 edition is in the works, but I haven't seen that.

I've found that 99% of the material in the O'Reilly books is the same, almost
word for word, as the material on the MIT tape.  It kind of bugs me that the
material is regurgitated in the O'Reilly books with only minimal
acknowledgements of the original authors.  The O'Reilly X11R1 book is laced
with typos, some really obvious, like references to tables that appear on the
MIT tape, but not in the O'Reilly book.  The X11R2 books are much better, but
still contain misleading or biased information.  For example, the section on
colormaps says:

    "The only time when you should really need to create a special colormap
    is when you are doing smooth shading, or similar applications that need
    many, strangely distributed colors.  But if you are doing that, you
    will probably be on a high-performance workstation, which allow multiple
    hardware colormaps, which will solve the problem."

I wish my boss believed that.

On the plus side, the O'Reilly books are formatted a little more nicely
than the MIT manuals.  I generally turn to the O'Reilly volume 2 (man
pages) before I go to the MIT manuals.  I still go to the MIT manuals
when I suspect the O'Reilly material (often with the X11R1 O'Reilly books,
infrequently with the X11R2 books).  I never use the O'Reilly volume 1.
For X Toolkit stuff, I always go to the MIT manuals, as the O'Reilly
books don't include anything from the MIT X Toolkit manuals.

Ken Lee
Daisy Sytems Corp., Interactive Graphics Tools Dept.
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