A Note About Zig Books for the Zig Community

[edyu]

Can I make a suggestion to not have any books out before 0.11? There are so many changes and nothing beats the frustration of any beginner learning from a book from something that breaks or changes significantly. I know it probably won’t be stable until 1.0 but at least wait until 0.11 come out for the love of “insert whoever you worship”.

[edyu]

I know it’s weird to recommend another book when we are talking about Zig but I HIGHLY recommend reading the “C Programming Language” (the original) book and do the exercises in that book.

Knowing C is a great way to learn many of the concepts and the motivation behind Zig.

@srazash

I’m definitely in that market, a lot of what I do (including professionally) is .NET/C#/JavaScript so while I’m comfortable working in C-like languages the majority of my experience is in garbage collected, heavily abstracted languages with huge libraries that do a lot of the heavy lifting for me.

In fact, one of the main attractions to Zig for me was that I lose a lot of that but in doing so I’ll be able to build incredibly efficient code and better understand how I’m interacting with the OS/CPU/RAM when I do.

I’m genuinely excited to see what people are going to be writing!

[srazash]

I had started reading it a while back actually, mostly out of curiosity, I should pick it back up! Once of the things I was looking for was an overview of allocating and freeing memory, so it may be time to hop back in.

[krilcebre]

It would nice to have a systems programming book that’s not written in C. Also, something like Effective Zig would also be great. Just some ideas.

[kristoff]

@krilcebre

Effective Zig

Which book are you referring to? Or more generally, what does the book do that’s different from a general programming language manual?

[krilcebre]

I was thinking in terms of best practices, common idioms and patterns that people usually come up with, and stuff like that.

First book that comes to mind is Fluent C by Christopher Preschern. It’s basically a book on best practices and patterns on a range of topics, from error handling and memory management to interface design, data lifetime and ownership and so on.

Most of the people can just search docs or online resources for basic syntax and similar, but there aren’t many resources that are talking about software design and common idioms in a language. This is especially true for non OOP languages, because most of the literature out there regarding software design and best practices talk in terms of OOP Design Patterns. And most of those design patterns do not apply to languages like Zig or C, so there is definitely a gap in common knowledge that you can basically get only if you have been working in the industry for quite some time.

A book focusing more on best practices, idioms and patterns would surely help a lot more in writing concise, understandable, scalable and maintainable code than a general programming language manual, which mostly focuses on syntax without showing how to use that syntax in a real, professional environment.

[lucianboboc]

I have not found any book on Zig which is strange.
Any ETA yet? when will the book be available?

[chrboesch]

In my opinion, it makes little sense to publish a book before zig version 1.

[z1fire]

Super off topic, but i would find it funny if we never hit zig 1.0 and instead did zig 0.9 but kept adding numbers behind it. Zig 0.91 → zig 0.999999. Always moving towards 1 but never crossing it.

[gonzo]

Just like for TeX, where the version numbers asymptotically approach π.

[z1fire]

I like that!