People Learn Visually
Often in programming books, the information can be obscured in a vast sea of words in page after page of dense paragraphs. As a programmer who has, over the years, used a dozen programming languages, I find it difficult to slog through another 1,000-page tome of dense text to learn the latest technology.
To address this need, I wrote Illustrated C# 2012 and Illustrated WPF. These texts cover the topics using figures, bulleted lists and short, and focused code samples.
Figures are of prime importance in these books; and hence the word "illustrated" in the titles. When I was teaching programming seminars I found that I could almost watch the lighbulbs go on over the students' heads as I drew the figures on the whiteboard. I've used that principle in these books, distilling each important point into one or more simple but accurate figures.
One Amazon reviewer of Illustrated WPF [Evan Lim, WPF Developer and Instructor] described it as follows:
.... Other WPF books typically describe a concept in text and then illustrate that concept using code samples and screen shots. The reader is left to translate the text into a mental image which he needs to really understand the concept. ... Solis literally draws you the "big picture" and shows you how the WPF pieces fit together visually....
But for something as intricate and precise and a programming language, there must be text as well as figures. But rather than long, wordy explanations, I've used short, concise descriptions and bulleted lists to make each piece of information visually distinct. The format can be summarized as follows:
- Concise text and simple explanations
- Bulleted lists summarizing each important point
- Tables clarifying and summarizing features
- Clear figures and diagrams that illustrate each feature
- Short, concise and focused code sample for each feature
Other considerations:
- Where possible I kept the code for each program entirely on a single page, or continued on the facing page so that the reader wouldn't have to flip pages while reading the code. (About 95% successful)
- Where possible I kept the figure illustrating a concept and the code sample implementing it on the same page or the facing page, making it easier for the reader to refer back and forth between them without having to flip a page. (About 95% successful)
Take care,
Dan Solis