Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Parody O'Reilly book covers (imgur.com)
222 points by tobyjsullivan on April 9, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 32 comments



My favorite is the refrigerator magnet we have on our refrigerator.

The refrigerator is where you put the refrigerator magnets, right? At least until the acid kicks in.

http://i.imgur.com/dy0ii.png


This is great! Is there a website selling these?


Here you go:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B015YEY7FA

It's a slightly different version of the image, but still a good one.


While most of them are well done and funny in their way, they are not actually parodies of O'Reilly, they are parodies of developer attitudes using O'Reilly cover style (similar to meme generator images).

As an O'Reilly parody I would expect something like "Official paper version of an OSS manual you can download on the project page". The Stack Overflow cover is kind of like that.


par·o·dy ˈperədē/ noun

noun: parody; plural noun: parodies

1. an imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect.

While splitting hairs can be fun, for all intents and purposes, I'd say this is a parody.


Staying in that definition: My comment was that the "deliberate exaggeration" would be an exaggeration of the original, not of something else. For example, these meme generator images using movie pictures with Brad Pitt are also not parodies of Brad Pitt.

But yeah, I know that it is hair splitting. ;)


Needs "Essential Debugging with print statements"


There's nothing wrong about "debugging with print statements".

If anything, if you're any good at it, it shows better knowledge of your program's behavior than blindly looking around in the stack on a debugger.

In fact some of the biggest name programmers use just that -- including the very people who created .

At best it's "hardcore" -- but not "bad" or anything like what's in the list. Here's some appeal to coding authority for ya:

"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements." Brian Kernigham

"I don't like debuggers. Never have, probably never will." — Linus Torvalds


> There's nothing wrong about "debugging with print statements".

Nor is there anything wrong with searching for the text of an error message, but both are funny to see as a fake book cover.


It's such a simple tool that it feels wrong the first time you do it.


Yet it's also the only thing that actually works in a tough debugging situation.


Thank you so much. I shall give my guilt complex its first day off for twenty years.


If you want to justify it even more, you can think of it as testing invariants at various points in your program flow!


One of the best things of the interview book "Programmers at Work", was that all the greatest programmers used printf to debug.


The very first thing I do when starting a new project is putting the logging infrastructure in place. In production you don't want to spam stderr with each and every event. But if some operation fails the best way to understand why, is having a precise log of what chain of operations lead to this error.



Though that's often a good technique.


Good...or the only / expedient option?

I remember the good old days over 10 years ago debugging PHP in such a way. When I moved into .Net I thought "wow I never need a print statement again with the awesome debug tools". But leaving the comfortable embrace of Microsoft and even today I'm using print / console.log().


Inside every set of debugging print statements is a debugging verbosity level trying to get out.


Does pr_debug count as a print statement? Cause I use that every day.



$35 for a t-shirt?!?! I was ready with the credit card until I saw that salty bit.


The amount of questions I find on StackOverflow that could have been found with a simple Google search makes me think there really is a need to read effective Googling of error messages.


Often times stack overflow is the first google result for certain types of error messages, and the responses are generally useful for both fixing and understanding the problem.


Missing the best one: http://imgur.com/m11eiu4



Not programming related, but a great one: https://i.imgur.com/JRzMTR7.jpg


If I only had the time, I'd make "Technical Debt: The Credit Card With No Limit".


I remember writing an internal white paper as a mock O'Reilly book. IIRC, my chosen animal was the badger.



Ben Argyle started doing designs like these 16 years ago - http://www.bofhcam.org/co-larters/index.html and you can buy his t-shirts etc. from Zazzle


'code written by some stranger on the internet is always perfect' - AWESOME! :D




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: