Hello,
I have slowly but surely gone through the entire book once.
I want to say thank you to the entire team at raywenderlich for putting together this book!
There simply aren’t many good (or even just “okay”) books on this subject, and the book by raywenderlich was the one that seemed best to me among the choices I could find.
So, thank you for writing the book.
On a slightly less positive note, and I hope you take it as my frank suggestion for improvement (as there usually always is room for improvement), I found that the biggest missing piece in this book is precision, especially precision in language.
I found several parts of the book to be ambiguous, because [I am guessing], the authors did not care enough to expand their thoughts, but [again I am guessing], assumed that if it makes sense in their own heads, then they would not take enough time to explain it? but simply write just about any sentence and move on [because we just want to finish writing this book and publish it? and we will care to make it more precise in future editions?].
Large projects should be taken piece by piece, I do not disagree to that; but I estimate that a bit more care could have been taken in writing the book. Did the entire team [or at least a handful of people] read the book before it was published? Did it go through a language check? I am talking about semantics.
If a sentence could have two different meanings, or gives room for two possible interpretations, then why not spend a bit more time to write a sentence that leaves lesser ambiguity, or none at all whenever possible?
I understand it is a challenge to produce an excellent book; it is not easy! However, I have read some books that really embraced this approach of no ambiguity!
I can only count that future editions of the book will be better.
I am providing this feedback in hopes that future editions will be excellent.
Because it seems that almost everyone wants to write a book these days [even though not all are good teachers], we have a plethora of bad books out there, sometimes bad information spreading around.
It is extremely important, in my opinion, that books be as precise as possible, both technically and semantically; because bad books can do a lot of harm!
I wish all writers understood that the words which they pen on paper will potentially be read by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people.
A good book, on the other hand, can be kept as a reference and a standard, and even a piece of art!
A good book can do a lot of good!
I have not been impressed by this 2nd edition.
However, I have certainly been impressed by the codebase; I think that your logical approach in the codebase is beautiful; I found your code to be very clean, and easy to read.
You might have a lot of excellent, technical, engineers that are not as passionate or enthused about writing!
Very passionate and excellent coders, programmers, and engineers, but [possibly] not as excited about writing a book to share their knowledge, and doing it just because.
In summary, I would recommend the following:
- Semantic precision when utilizing the English language to convey concepts.
I read through the entire book; the book was okay, but not excellent!
As a final note, please I am only just 1 individual giving an opinion, and I have gone though the book only once, and I am not a Flutter developer, and I did not have previous experience with mobile development (although I am familiar with web development); therefore, if most other readers have been impressed, then you could just say that I am the exception, and safely brush aside my feedback if you so choose.
Thank you, and let’s toast to a better edition!
Very respectfully, and thank you for having the best book that seemed to me on the subject among the choices i could find! But, once again, best among a bunch doesn’t mean best that could be … and as time goes by, some other authors might take on the subject and do a much better job if we do not improve.
Thanks again!