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Show HN: Sublime Text Book

163 pointsby wesbosover 10 years ago

25 comments

jawnsover 10 years ago
Let&#x27;s talk about the price of the e-book, $36.<p>For a standard nonfiction e-book, that price is fairly high, but when it comes to software&#x2F;programming books, you expect it to be a bit higher than average.<p>I took a look at some O&#x27;Reilly titles around the same price point, and specifically at books that are similar to this, where you&#x27;re really learning about how to make use of a particular software program&#x27;s features, rather than how to write in a particular programming language or understand a particular abstract concept or niche in software development.<p>&quot;Textmate: Power Editing for the Mac&quot; is 200 pages, $30 for a print edition.<p>&quot;Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought&quot; is 346 pages, $30 for a print edition.<p>&quot;Learning GNU Emacs: A Guide to Unix Text Processing&quot; is 536 pages, $36 for an e-book.<p>It seems to be generally the case, and these examples bear it out, that e-books are priced lower than physical copies, and shorter books are priced lower than longer books. I would add that niche books (where the information is hard to find elsewhere) also command a premium.<p>Based on that, I would suggest that this Sublime Text book should probably be priced a bit lower. It&#x27;s an e-book, it&#x27;s only 220 pages, and though it&#x27;s nice to have all of the information conveniently packaged in one place, it seems like the majority of the book talks about stuff you can easily Google about (and typically find a high-quality answer, precisely because the Sublime Text community is so large and active).<p>Edit: I don&#x27;t usually complain about downvotes, but it&#x27;s pretty evident that people are downvoting this because they disagree, not because they think it doesn&#x27;t add anything substantive to the discussion. I&#x27;m an author myself, so I know how much work goes into producing (and marketing) a book, and I&#x27;m totally supportive of the author trying to make the project worth his time. I&#x27;m merely pointing out that if you look at the market, its list price should probably be closer to the &quot;with coupon&quot; price.
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Silhouetteover 10 years ago
Looking at the sample chapter, this book seems reasonably well written and might be a good buy for someone new to ST who wants to get up to speed quickly.<p>I think calling it a book for power users is highly optimistic. Much of it seems to be more like the manual ST should have had but never has, describing routine tools and pointing out keyboard shortcuts that you could find for yourself just exploring the default keyboard map. That is certainly a useful gap to fill, but there seems to be little if anything in the table of contents about real power user features like defining or customising languages, templates&#x2F;snippets, themes, plugins, etc. I hope the choice of title doesn&#x27;t lead to disappointment from actual power users while causing those who would enjoy and benefit from the book to go elsewhere.<p>I did notice that the sample chapter PDF has quite a few obvious layout problems, and that the expanded TOC on the web site has obvious typos, so the jury is out on editorial&#x2F;production quality.<p>As a final comment, the author seems very keen on ST3, which makes me hesitant. I gave up and installed ST3 myself a little while ago, after too many packages I relied on self-updated into just not working any more on ST2. Now instead of a productive text editor that I enjoyed and recommended a year or two ago, I have a crash-prone, bug-ridden mess, which just has different packages I used to rely on that don&#x27;t work reliably instead. So I&#x27;m pretty down on the whole fragmented ST ecosystem and lack of progress&#x2F;support for existing customers right now. While I assume none of this is the author&#x27;s fault, perhaps the timing of this book launch is unfortunate; it might be a better buy if and when ST3 and its package ecosystem are up to production quality, updated to reflect whatever the best available supporting packages are at that time.
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KobaQover 10 years ago
I&#x27;m just asking myself if this belongs to hacker news. When does something deserve to be posted as &quot;Show HN&quot;? Does the link to what someone wants to show us lead to a rich discussion about tech, start-up, programming, business and other topics of general interest here?<p>Is it a interesting website, that we can experience and talk about? Is it code? Is it an interesting business idea?<p>In this case, I think this &quot;Show HN&quot; post is advertsing only.
dansoover 10 years ago
Nice...I generally skip over the endorsements section but Addy Osamni&#x27;s statement of confidence caught my eye, and it reminded me why I should even be interested in such a narrowly-tailored book: optimizing workflow.<p>I&#x27;ve clearly lost brain cells as I&#x27;ve gotten older, but I think I&#x27;ve been able to maintain a constant rate of learning new things by reducing the amount of slack and drag in how I work (and read)...I really like the selling point of &quot;As a developer, I value my time at $100&#x2F;hr and this book will save me 30 min&#x2F;day...This means I will have an extra $12,500 per year&quot;. That&#x27;s a nice way to think about it, though it probably underestimates the impact of more time in life.<p>I like the pricing of the video (at least at the launch price)...I almost never learn via video (yes, I&#x27;m that old) but for an extra $9 (or +$5 of the regularly-priced book)...that&#x27;s not at all a bad deal. And I&#x27;ve been trying to make screencasts on workflow and tooling and am always interested in how the pros teach with video.<p>So, sold.
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_raulover 10 years ago
Very nice. One thing I&#x27;m missing in the TOC is a chapter on creating your own packages: the official docs are (as usual) quite sparse and I&#x27;d love to have a couple chapters (tutorial + reference) instead of following the typical &quot;take a look at a existing package and wing it from there&quot; approach. Can someone recommend some good resources on this topic?
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ghshephardover 10 years ago
Love the concept - but reading the sample chapter, the layout was extremely distracting. Tons of widows&#x2F;orphans, and even some images that were cut <i>across</i> pages.<p>When you are selling a book for $36, the bar is a little higher in terms of the quality of the presentation.
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wesbosover 10 years ago
If anyone wants $10 off either package, use coupon code LAUNCHDAY - 100% money back guarantee
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DevX101over 10 years ago
I&#x27;ve been planning on registering my sublime for some time. Gonna do it now. I just did a trial of WebStorm and realized my Sublime setup is still the superior editor (with the right plugins: VIM, git, git gutter, Origami, HTMLPrettify).<p>I&#x27;ve evaluated it for the past 6 months but looks like they finally convinced me to fork over the cash. If you&#x27;ve been evaluating for more than a few months and you&#x27;re not a student, pay up!
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kendallparkover 10 years ago
I can&#x27;t find a text editor superior to Sublime. Maybe one day I&#x27;ll buck up and learn vim then join the superiority-complex crowd, but until then Sublime all the way.<p>I was hoping that Atom would be better or comparable, but just doesn&#x27;t feel as solid as Sublime. So laggy.<p>Has anyone read this book? Good reviews?
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ivancaover 10 years ago
Disappointing that it doesn&#x27;t have a chapter for plugin development, in my opinion that&#x27;s the best feature of Sublime Text: You can use all the python ecosystem plus it has a nice API. Plus you understand anyone&#x27;s plugins because is all python, not some random lang they like.
code_chimpover 10 years ago
Just skimming and the content seems really good so far, just a couple of nits to pick. The PDF appears to be missing a table of contents and the chapter links starting on page 2 are not working in Okular running on Ubuntu 14.04 - they appear as links to files on the author&#x27;s local DropBox.<p>The epub looks pretty good on the iPad.
stuntmachineover 10 years ago
CSSDEVCONF removes $15 off of the price.
wnmover 10 years ago
i love sublime, and i love to learn new things that make me more productive or efficient, so i&#x27;m your target audience. if i&#x27;d want to convince my boss to buy this (as you suggestest on your salespage :)), i&#x27;d probably need a paperprint version... but i&#x27;m actually thinking about buying this just for myself.<p>great work on the sales page! looks very well done.<p>one thing you can think about: why not let users give you their email address to get the free chapter?
zaatarover 10 years ago
Thanks; I just purchased the book+video; is there a recommended way to print out a paper copy for my own use beyond just hammering my own (or work) printer?
pdknskover 10 years ago
This is personal preference, but I dislike when sites force a download for files which can just as well be displayed in the browser, such as the sample PDF.
Pamarover 10 years ago
I have a Mac for use at home, but most of my coding is done at the office on a windows machine... Can anyone suggest a similar resource for Ultraedit?
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bhaumikover 10 years ago
First thoughts via @tholex. <a href="http://i.imgur.com/7me4WYG.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;7me4WYG.png</a>
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alphabetamover 10 years ago
I&#x27;m a proficient VIM user. Can Sublime compete? Is it worth trying to learn it?
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RubberMulletover 10 years ago
The volume level in the sample video seems very low. Are all the videos like this?
jasetover 10 years ago
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8424337" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8424337</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8418552" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8418552</a>
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oronover 10 years ago
Looks nice and priced fairly, got my copy, Thanks.
sergiotapiaover 10 years ago
Shame you only accept Credit Cards, I live in South America and only have access to PayPal for online payments.
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tsaxover 10 years ago
Bought!
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victorhooiover 10 years ago
I&#x27;m pretty tempted to buy a copy.<p>However, the thing holding me back is, I&#x27;ve recently switched from SublimeText to Atom.<p>I didn&#x27;t see much development on the SublimeText front, and Atom seemed to have a growing community.<p>For anybody that&#x27;s purchased it - what are your thoughts on how applicable this might be Atom? Or helpful to somebody using it?<p>(I know that Atom is &quot;inspired&quot; by SublimeText)
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nayakover 10 years ago
Editor is $70 if you want to buy and this book is more than $30. Combined price of both of these is more than I paid for my OS long back. Too much investment for a editor and learning it.