Handling Source Code in Books

This is an update of a post that originally appeared on April 4, 2011.

One of the biggest conundrums for the technical writer is how to handle source code in a book. The goal is to present an easily understood example to the reader—one that demonstrates a principle in a clear and concise manner. In fact, complexity is a problem with many examples—the author tries to stuff too much information into the example and ends up obfuscating the very principles that the reader is supposed to obtain.

There is also the problem with pages because books have a limited number of them. The technical writer must balance the depth and functionality of the examples against a need to present as many examples as possible. Even if a book is balanced, some readers are going to be disappointed that the book doesn’t contain the example they actually needed. So, very often simplicity must win the day in creating application source code for a book, despite the desire of the author to present something more real world, something with additional glitz and polish.

Because the goal of an example is to teach, very often the examples you see in a book have more comments than those that you see in real life. An example in a book must include as much information as possible if the code is going to fulfill its purpose. Of course, book comments should illustrate all the best principles of creating comments in real code. In short, if real world code looked a bit more like book code, then its possible that developers would spend far less time trying to figure code out and more time making changes.

Some readers will take the author to task because the code may not always provide the error trapping that production code provides. In fact, as with many teaching environments, the safety features in code are often removed for the sake of clarity. This problem plagues other environments too. In the past, it was common for woodworking magazines post a note near the beginning of the magazine telling the reader that the safety devices have been removed for the sake of clarity and that no one in their right mind would actually work with woodworking equipment without the safety devices. Likewise, the code you see in a book often lacks sufficient error trapping, making the principle that the code demonstrates clearer, at the cost of fragility. You can usually cause book examples to break easily, but no one in their right mind would create production code like that.

Choosing good examples for a book is hard, so getting your input really is important. I may not be able to provide precisely the example you need or want, but I may be able to provide something similar in the next edition of the book. Of course, I won’t know your needs or wants unless you tell me about them. I’m always open to hearing your ideas. However, I’m not open to providing free consulting in the form of troubleshooting your error code unless you’re willing to hire me to do so. Please keep the discussion to ideas that you’d like to see in book updates by contacting me at [email protected].

Source Code Placement

This is an update of a post that originally appeared on October 12, 2015.

I always recommend that you download the source code for my books. The Verifying Your Hand Typed Code post discusses some of the issues that readers encounter when typing code by hand. However, I also understand that many people learn best when they type the code by hand and that’s the point of getting my books—to learn something really interesting (see my principles for creating book source code in the Handling Source Code in Books post). Even if you do need to type the source code in order to learn, having the downloadable source code handy will help you locate errors in your code with greater ease. I won’t usually have time to debug your hand typed code for you.

Depending on your platform, you might encounter a situation the IDE chooses an unfortunate place to put the source code you want to save. For example, a Windows System might choose the Program Files folder, which contains a space and doesn’t allow saving of files unless you specifically override the default rights. Fortunately, modern IDEs do manage to avoid many of these problems, but you still need to be aware that they could exist, especially when using an older IDE.

My recommendation for fixing these, and other source code placement problems, is to create a folder that you can access and have full rights to work with to store your source code. My books usually make a recommendation for the source code file path, but you can use any path you want. The point is to create a path that’s:

  • Easy to access
  • Allows full rights
  • Lacks spaces in any of the pathname elements
  • On a local drive, rather than a cloud drive in many cases

As long as you follow these rules, you likely won’t experience problems with your choice of source code location. If you do experience source code placement problems when working with my books, please be sure to let me know at [email protected].

Verifying Your Hand Typed Code

This is an update of a post that originally appeared on January 10, 2014.

I maintain statistics for each of my books that are based on reviews and reader e-mails (so those e-mails you send really are important). These statistics help me write better books in the future and also help me determine the sorts of topics I need to address in my blog. It turns out that one of the most commonly asked questions is why a reader’s hand typed code doesn’t work. Some readers simply ask the question without giving me any details at all, which makes the question impossible to answer. In some cases, the reader sends the hand typed code, expecting that I’ll take time to troubleshoot it. However, this isn’t a realistic request because it defeats the very purpose behind typing the code by hand. If I take the time to diagnose the problems in the code you typed, I’ll be the one to learn an interesting lesson, not you. If you learn better by doing—that is, by typing the code by hand and then running it, then you need to be the one to troubleshoot any problems with the resulting code.

My advice to readers is to use the downloadable source code when working through the book text. If you want to type the code by hand after that as part of your learning experience, at least you’ll know that the example works on your system and you’ll also understand how the example works well enough to troubleshoot any errors in your own code. However, you need to be the one to diagnose the errors. If nothing else, perform a character-by-character comparison of your code to the example code that you downloaded from the publisher’s site. Often, a reader will write back after I suggest this approach and mention that they had no idea that a particular special symbol or method of formatting content was important. These are the sorts of lessons that this kind of exercise provide.

Now, it has happened that the downloadable source code doesn’t always work on a particular user’s system. When the error is in the code or something I can determine about the coding environment, you can be certain that I’ll post information about it on my blog. This should be the first place you look for such information. Simply click on the book title in question under the Technical category. You’ll find a list of posts for that book. Always feel free to contact me about a book-specific question. I want to be sure you have a good learning experience.

There are some situations where a reader tries to run application code that won’t work on a particular system. My books provide information on the kind of system you should use, but I can’t always determine exceptions to the rule in advance. When I post system requirements, your system must meet those requirements because the examples are guaranteed to fail on lesser systems. If you encounter a situation where the downloadable code won’t run on your system, but none of the fixes I post for that code work and your system does meet the requirements, then please feel free to contact me. There are times where an example simply won’t run because you can’t use the required software or the system won’t support it for whatever reason.

The point of this post is that you need to work with the downloadable source code whenever possible. The downloadable source code has been tested by a number of people, usually on a range of systems, to ensure it will work on your system too. I understand that typing the code by hand is an important and viable way to learn, but you should reserve this method as the second learning tier—used after you have tried the downloadable source code. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns at [email protected].

Working with Code in e-Books

This is an update of a post that originally appeared on March 16, 2016.

Most of my technical readers now use e-books instead of paper books. Of course, there is a convenience factor to storing your entire library on a Kindle, even if it’s a software version of the Kindle. Of course, there are all sorts of e-book formats for your desktop system as well. The point is that electronic format makes a lot of sense when dealing with technical books.

However, e-books can cause some interesting problems and I’ve encountered a few with a number of readers now. The most important consideration is that you can’t cut and paste code from an e-book directly into your IDE and expect it to work. There are all sorts of reasons for this exclusion. For example, cutting and pasting may insert special characters into the output stream or the resulting paste may not have white space in the right places. A common problem is that publishers often convert regular single and double quotes into curly quote equivalents. The two kinds of quotes (both single and double) are completely different and the second type definitely won’t compile.

The best option when working with an e-book is to view the code in the e-book, but still get the downloadable source code for the book from my website or the publisher’s website as described in the book’s introduction. If you can’t find the downloadable source, always feel free to contact me at [email protected]. I want to be sure you have a great reading experience, which means having source code that actually runs in your development environment.

Another potential problem with e-books is that you may see unfortunate code breaks (despite the efforts of the publisher and myself). When you need to understand how white space works with a programming language, always review the downloadable source. The fact that the downloadable source compiles and runs tells you that all the of white space is in the right place and of the correct type. Typing the source code directly out of your e-book could result in added carriage returns or other white space errors that will cause the code to fail, even though the commands, variables, and other parts of the code are all correct.

As always, I’m open to your questions about my books. If you don’t understand how things work, please contact me—that’s why I’m here.

Mac Gatekeeper Error

This is an update of a post that originally appeared on March 21, 2016.

A number of my books ask readers to download an IDE or other code and install it on their Mac systems. The problem is that the Mac system won’t always cooperate. For example, you might see an error dialog like the one shown for Code::Blocks:

The Gatekeeper error tells you that it won't allow you to install software from unknown publishers.
Your Mac won’t let you install software.

The problem is one of permissions. The default permissions set for newer Mac systems restrict you to getting your apps from the Mac App Store or from vendors who have signed their files. Fortunately, you can overcome this problem either temporarily or permanently, depending on how you want to use your Mac. The blog post What is Gatekeeper & How to Disable Gatekeeper on Monterey? provides you with illustrated, step-by-step directions to perform the task using either method. Let me know if you encounter any other problems getting your Mac to install the software required to use my books at [email protected].

UnZIPping the Downloadable Source

A number of readers have written me to say that they are using the downloadable source and can see the files on their hard drive. However, when they go to access the file using their IDE, the IDE won’t open it. Modern operating systems make things easier for people by displaying the contents of .zip and other archive files as if they’re another directory or folder on the system. However, the IDE doesn’t have the same advantage. You need to remove the files from the .zip archive and place them somewhere on your hard drive that the IDE can locate. You can tell that you’re looking at a .zip file by looking at the path. If you see something like C:\Temp\A4D2E.zip\A4D2E, where A4D2E.zip is the name of the archive, then you know that you’re looking in an archive file. If you still have problems getting the files to open, make sure you remove any spaces from the path that your IDE is using. You can contact me at [email protected] if you have any additional questions about this issue.