This isn't meant to sound trivial or petty: I'm glad to see that Hillegass continues his tradition of publishing books with reasonably good-looking covers. I think this is less a problem in the last few years as more publishers are beginning to consider nice design for their covers, but when "Cocoa Programming: 2nd Edition" and "Core MacOSX & Unix Programming" came out, it was one of the only programming books that didn't look like almost every other programming book out there - dorky. And I can tell that he had input in this. So in a sense, he is not only a good teacher and writer, but a pioneer of good book cover design (in the domain of programming books).
For those who will inevitably say, "yeah, but who cares about the cover, I care about what's in it" - sure, of course what's in it is exponentially more important than the cover, but books have a permanence that blog posts, web sites, and PDFs don't. They sit around my house, my office, on my desk; I have to look at them regularly. Books on programming are among the most expensive and, content-wise, most important books I own. It's nice when they don't look like some third-rate word processing instruction manual. Keep it up, Hillegass.
by Erik — Feb 18
For those who will inevitably say, "yeah, but who cares about the cover, I care about what's in it" - sure, of course what's in it is exponentially more important than the cover, but books have a permanence that blog posts, web sites, and PDFs don't. They sit around my house, my office, on my desk; I have to look at them regularly. Books on programming are among the most expensive and, content-wise, most important books I own. It's nice when they don't look like some third-rate word processing instruction manual. Keep it up, Hillegass.