Hi any opinions on the Zig book published on packt
My experience with anything packt is usually very bad
So i was wondering if any one on the forum knows about this book
Learning Zig: A reimagined introduction to low-level programming with Zig by Alex Rios
It is difficult to say, as all of the previews give a 404.
While I am confident that there are exceptions, I personally would be apprehensive to buy books of any subject in the modern era from any shady/unknown source due to the prevalence of AI generated garbage.
The fact that Zig is rapidly evolving only exacerbates this problem: a book that was genuinely written with love and care would take considerable time, but rapidly get outdated on various topics. On the other hand an AI-generated book is just going to be plain wrong about many topics, likely using bastardized combinations of previous Zig versions.
Fwiw here is author blog Learning Zig - My Second Book! | alexrios
The guy seems recognized in the Go community, he has been a speaker at last GoCon
Judging by this post:
and the content in the GitHub repository associated with the book, it seems extremely likely that the writing was at the very least edited by AI. Here’s one example of some writing that has the hallmarks of LLM output, and is generally a pretty bizarrely argued point IMO:
Automatic heap allocation: A ticking time bomb
Then, there’s automatic heap allocation. It’s all fun and games until your system runs out of memory. At that point, your program isn’t just inefficient, it’s unusable. Crashes, hangs, and the dreaded out-of-memory errors are all too common when you let the system decide how and when to allocate heap memory. It’s like handing the keys to your car to someone who doesn’t know how to drive-things might go well for a while, but sooner or later, you’re headed for a crash.
(FWIW I’ve written something on the same general topic before if you’re curious about how I approached it)
I’ll leave it to others to judge the quality of the code examples if they can look past that writing style:
I did notice that many of them are using page_allocator directly, so not a fantastic first impression.
On the other hand, this one looks like it is off to a good start, and seems quite human oriented:
I bought this book a few days a go, it’s an easy read but quite incomplete as it’s still WIP. Now I am going through https://pedropark99.github.io
I purchased the MEAP a few days ago as well, and read the three chapters that have been released so far. Not only in-depth and quite high quality, but also just plain enjoyable to read. I can definitely recommend it so far.
I checked this out but I noticed a few places that are out date / examples that didn’t compile.
Coding documentation does need to have CI and the appropriate tooling to maintain the buildability of all sample code. Even better if that includes tests. Even snippets for publication can be maintained in building/running source, with the right tooling.
I wish all authors felt that way.