You should probably at least read the free PDF sample before jumping to conclusions you know?!
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Consider keeping your unfounded opinions to yourself if you don’t have anything nice to say.
@cscalfani has been active in various community channels for a long time, and I have no doubt he has plenty of interesting stories to tell about using PureScript to solve real problems in the industry.
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If I could restate your above comments/questions, I think you’re saying something like this
While I would really like to grow in my understanding and abilities, is it worth it to read the book?
This book is 2,000 pages long; that’s a huge commitment to make. I don’t believe I’ve seen the author contribute in other significant ways in the community, so I’m hesitant to believe the book’s claims that it really does make learning FP easier. I’m not trying to offend the author, but there have been many people who have tried writing such a work. Many such works also claim to be “the” book you need to read to finally unlock FP.
So, should I read this book? Or should I continue using other resources (e.g. the PS by Example book)?
Given the Table of Contents of the book and his response to my original question above, I’d already recommend this book over my own work (GitHub - JordanMartinez/purescript-jordans-reference: Learn PureScript with this "clone and play" repository) for those who want a deeper understanding of PureScript and how to use it to solve real world problems. I don’t think the goal of this book is to enable you to write “Hello world” immediately. Rather, I think it will likely make you a competent FP programmer.
I’ve been thinking of buying and reading it myself to just see what I could learn.
Obviously, the page length means you can’t just pick up the book and know PureScript in a few hours. But most people who try to do that anyway often get stuck by all sorts of things. There’s a reason so many monad tutorials exist. If anything, the length is necessary because how else could you accomplish the goal of guiding someone through every nook and cranny of a problem they could experience when learning PureScript and how to use it to build a web app?
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Seems the free PDF sample (which is btw currently not available for download, S3 error) mostly covers topics which can be found in this nice document: GitHub - mjepronk/wiwinwl-purescript: What I Wish I Knew When Learning PureScript
I believe it would be useful to see there some more advanced topics disclosed.
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What section in particular would you like to see?
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This is just a proposal to make the content more open, maybe: Monad Stacks/Transformers.
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I’ll take this into consideration the next time I release a sample, which I’m going to do to capture some of the typos readers have informed me of.
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I’m currently studying Haskell From First Principles and intend improve my FP skills through PureScript afterwards.
That being said, I wanted to point out that the book is expensive depending where one lives, like in my case (Brazil) and the price converted to BRL is a small fortune for most of us underpaid developers around here. Bear in mind I think the book and your work is worth every single cent. Just saying that it is harder for people in some places to be able to purchase it.
Took a look at the sample. Looks awesome! I was impressed with the sheer amount of snippets of code and examples. The font, colors and overall look and feel of the book is very pleasant and easy to read.
I especially loved the callouts. They just make it so natural and easy to read the explanation of each specific piece of code under scrutiny. By the way, did you use Asciidoctor?
All in all, amazing job! Congrats are in order!! λ
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Originally, I thought setting the lowest price to $39.99 would allow people in other countries purchase the book. But a few people have reached out to me and when I asked them what they can afford, I was shocked. I’m not surprised at my ignorance about how much more expensive things are here and how we’re lucky to be able to easily afford $40 for a book since I’ve really haven’t been outside of the US except for a few exceptions.
In every case someone has reached out to me, I’ve given them a coupon for whatever they said they could afford. But that doesn’t scale well and it leaves out everyone who isn’t persistent enough to reach out.
I’ve been struggling with a solution short of lowering the price which will devalue the book for a lot people. I really think people need to have some skin in the game. If you don’t pay for something, you don’t value it when compared to things you do pay for.
I recently spoke to Leanpub and they suggested that I put a message for anyone who cannot afford it, to reach out to me via the Email the Author link and then I could send them a coupon.
This solves only half of the problem, i.e. it doesn’t leave anyone out who feels that emailing me is imposing. But it still doesn’t scale well. But it’s all I’ve got at my disposal ATM. So, I plan to add that to the book’s page soon.
Please let me know if it’s too expensive for you and let me know what you can afford and I’ll gladly send you a coupon link.
Thanks for educating me. And thanks for the kind words. And yes I used AsciiDoctor for the CALLOUTS. I think they’re an amazing tool for teaching/learning code. I’m so happy to hear you appreciate the layout and look of the book. I spent the first month working on getting that right. For me, aesthetics are critical. If a book is unapproachable, you won’t learn as well. But if it pleases the eye, you will enjoy every minute you spend with it.
Take care.
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Maybe you can set discount on specials days, or occasions
People who bought the book at a higher price, should not feel bad
Almost all book publishers, offer limited time coupons or limited time discounts
Kudos
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Thanks for the suggestion. But I think having a way to ALWAYS get it at a reasonable price for your country might be better. I could be completely wrong. I’ve never done this before. So I’m going to try the coupon notice on the page and if it fails, I’m going to try your suggestion.
I really want to make sure that someone’s inability to pay US prices never holds them back.
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Hi @cscalfani. Thanks for the well-explained response.
I think I should clarify on something I said in my previous message about being hard for “underpaid developers around here”. Besides that sad reality, we also have the problem of the value of BRL compared to USD and/or other currencies.
Also, I believe I can now mention that the copy of Haskell From First Principles I have was given me for free by Christopher Allen (the author) because when I tried to purchase it, my credit card at the time (about 2 years ago) did not allow international purchases. So, I contacted him asking for other means to pay, and he gave me a copy of the book (PDF). I now have a credit card that allows me to pay for stuff outside Brazil and I am still in debt with Chris. I mean to buy his book at some point as a form of gratitude and as a way of being just/fair. I didn’t mention this previously because I did not want to sound like I was asking or demanding a free copy of your book, or that you should act in the same way Chris did. I also realized that you could think “how could this person buy Chris’ book but not mine?” and that is another reason I am mentioning this now.
I agree with you that paying for something (being it in money or any other form of value) helps one to appreciate things in a more enlightening way, not taking everything for granted.
By your explanation, I also see that you are in a difficult situation. It must be time consuming to keep replying emails with coupons. Indeed, not scalable and does not fully solves the problem.
I have seen some sites that detect the visitor is located on an underdeveloped country and automatically displays a different price on their (or at least certain) products. I understand this is up to the platform, not the author.
As per your kind offer, I’ll contact you when I reach the point I can really commit my time and energy to study the book.
Thank you very much!
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A thought on that, the first chapter in the book explains the big size is partially due to font choice and code, expect that many pages of the 2000 to be code
I am guessing many of it will be simple straightforward code
For me this means, that it will probably take a lot “less” commitment to go through the book, than what you might originally think
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I turns out that I did make a suggestion to Leanpub that they detect, base on IP address, that someone is from an underdeveloped country and that we could set the price accordingly. Unfortunately, I got the feeling even if they were to agree to this, that I wouldn’t see it any time soon.
Please feel free to reach out to me whenever you’re ready. Best of luck.
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@cscalfani thanks for this book, I am going through the sample and looks great! I see you have worked in many different fields, industries and technologies. I wanted to ask you, What is your take on the performance of PureScript and FP in general? I love FP but my main push back is always around performance, I hate wasting resources and hate that computers being faster than ever apps still feel laggy, slow or consume a lot of resources.
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I’m currently using PureScript and Haskell to build business applications. They are less demanding than game engines or image processing or process control. But they still have to perform well otherwise the user will become impatient.
In my personal experience, Haskell can be extremely fast if done right. PureScript is hampered by the fact it runs in the browser when compared with a binary compile, but, to be honest, it’s more than fast enough for 95% of the business apps that are being built by companies today.
I certainly would write my servers in Haskell, but I used to write in JS on Node and writing in PureScript is more enjoyable to me at least than Haskell. So, depending on the situation, you can certainly write PureScript on a server or command line application. In the book, we’ll build a server in PureScript.
I’d ask others their experience in this area. My current work is limited to business applications. I’m sure there are others with different experiences and it would be interesting to see what their experiences are.
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Just started out with your book and am thoroughly enjoying it. Thank you for the gargantuan effort you must have put into this.
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Just a heads up: the book is now #1 on the list of top books on Leanpub. Congrats @cscalfani!
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So happy to hear that. It was a 2 year journey and nearly every weekend in one of those years.
Happy Learning.
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Premature performance perturbation is probably even more evil than premature performance optimization. 