Well, it's hard to think of anything <i>radically</i> unique. But some memorable things that come to mind:<p>- the way Graham, Knuth & Patashnik's <i>Concrete Mathematics</i> has the students' comments, silly or enlightening, in the margins. Its also very well designed and put together.<p>- I absolutely love the design of Sedgewick & Wayne's <i>Algorithms</i> (4th ed.) The fonts, colour palette, diagrams illustrating algorithms etc, are all miraculously awesome. The next algorithms book I looked at seemed so tedious and incompetent I wanted to complain.<p>- I love raganwald's <i>JavaScript Allongé</i> apart from the pictures. But there are pictures throughout of coffee, coffee machines, coffee bushes etc with coffee-related captions, all totally unrelated to the text, that somehow work, like a breath of fresh air through the book.<p>- Needham's <i>Visual Complex Analysis</i> is a marvel of clarity in word and picture.<p>- <i>Eloquent Javascript</i> (I read the online version[0]) is impressively well-designed. A good mix of covering-the-basics and projects. A clean, simple and beautiful form.<p>[0] <a href="http://eloquentjavascript.net/" rel="nofollow">http://eloquentjavascript.net/</a>
The book structure depends on your goals for the reader.<p>Books that are for teaching a skill to a beginner generally follow a project based approach. You start with a basic concept and have the reader build a project. Then you go on to a more advanced topic and have the reader build a more advanced project. It would be great if each project built upon the previous ones. I think that is one reason why Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial is so popular: <a href="https://www.railstutorial.org/book" rel="nofollow">https://www.railstutorial.org/book</a>.<p>Then there are reference books. These are for experienced people to go back and relearn a concept they forgot. These books are great when organized with a clear table of contents for easily looking up topics. They don't need elaborate projects, but they do need examples to demonstrate the application of the concept. Something like the C++ reference would fall into this category: <a href="http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/</a>.<p>Hope that helps. Good luck!
Eloquent ruby was one of my favorite technical books to read. Short and concise(10-20 pages each) topic chapters with motivation opening, explanation of the subject and ending with a real world example from rails or ruby or some other opensource library.<p>The writing and clarity of explanation is the top quality I look for in technical writing though.<p>Edit... Looking at your past submission I would go with project based layout that focuses on one topic at a time but touches on the other topics as needed. With questions at the end of each chapter and project ideas / part lists for home exploration. Sounds like a fun project, good luck!
I’m a huge fan of <i>Practical Typography</i> by Matthew Butterick.<p>- If you only read it linearly it gives you the most crucial points early up front.<p>- It does an excellent job of linking between and to relevant sections. The most natural way to read the book is to read it <i>non-linearly</i>.<p>- It balances depth and brevity.<p><a href="https://practicaltypography.com" rel="nofollow">https://practicaltypography.com</a>
POODR (Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby) by Sandi Metz is my favorite. Each idea in every chapter is backed up by a very specific example of refactoring. I can't really put a description on the type of structure, but I love the book structure.
Jon Duckett: HTML/CSS<p>It's really beautiful, and a crazy visual way to learn how to design web pages. And it ramps up slowly and nicely enough for you to fully understand everything.