Saturday, January 19th, 2008
It starts now. To be eligible to win a free electronic copy of Learn to Tango With D
all you need to do is to leave a comment below telling everyone what you like the most about the D language. The following rules apply:
- any off-topic comments will not be eligible to win
- you must enter your email address in the comment form, else I can’t contact you if you win — it will not be publicly visible — and you must also leave your name in the form else I won’t consider it a valid entry.
- I ask that you only leave one comment on the given topic so that everyone has the same odds of winning — obvious multiple entries will be ignored. I have no way to enforce this beyond the obvious so it’s on the honor system.
- I may cancel the contest at any time or refuse to give the prize to anyone at all. It would take something extreme to make me do this, but if you don’t like it don’t bother entering.
- comments posted after 11:59 pm GMT on Sunday, Jan 20 will not be eligible. So get your comment in before then.
That’s it. The winner will be chosen at random from the pool of eligible entries. I’ll announce the winner within three days after the close of the contest. Now tell me what’s so great about D!
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, contest, programming books
Posted in Learn to Tango With D | 29 Comments »
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
This coming weekend I will be holding a little ‘contest’ here on the blog. I will make a post asking for readers to comment on a particular subject. Everyone who comments before a predetermined time will be eligible to win an electronic copy of Learn to Tango With D. The winner will be chosen at random. I’ll make the post some time in the next 48 hours and will give all of the relevant details at the time.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, programming books
Posted in Learn to Tango With D, News | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
The electronic version of Learn to Tango with D is now available for purchase and immediate download.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, Tango, programming books
Posted in Learn to Tango With D, Tango | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 4th, 2008
I’ve received confirmation from Apress that ‘Learn to Tango with D’ is scheduled to be released on Jan 28. The ebook version should be available on Jan 7 unless something crops up to prevent that. We authors recently received the final PDF version of the book and are giving it a going over to make last minute corrections. That could potentially affect the release date of the ebook version. I’ll be sure to let you know if it does.
The Amazon page still has not been updated with the current book description and correct author bios, though the publisher did inform me that the changes were submitted. The correct info is online at the publisher’s site, however.
The book weighs in at 188 pages. The foreword is by Walter Bright, followed by the following 8 chapters (this is a condensed TOC that only nests one level–the full TOC goes deeper):
- First Steps
- Hello World
- Source Modules
- Package, Import, and Symbol Visibility
- Installation
- Compilation Tools
- D Fundamentals
- Declarations
- Pointers
- Arrays
- Flow Control
- Functions
- Error Handling
- D’s Object-Oriented Features
- Modules
- Structs and Unions
- Classes
- Interfaces
- Procedural Lifetime
- D Language Type Classifications
- Scope and Lifetime
- Storage Classes
- Static Constructors
- Lifetime Characteristics of Modules
- Lifetime Characteristics of Functions
- Garbage Collection
- Templates
- The Problem of Insufficient Information
- Type Templates
- Function Templates
- Template Specialization
- Template Metaprogramming
- Compile-Time Function Evaluation
- Text Processing
- String-Manipulation Utilities
- Text Class
- Numeric Conversion
- Layout and Formatting
- Input and Output
- Console I/O
- Stream I/O
- Network I/O
- File Handling
- The Other Packages
- The Package Rundown
- Threads and Fibers
- Collections
- Logging
- And That’s Not All!
The first five chapters cover the language and chapters 6-8 focus on Tango.
I’ll post any more updates as I get them.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, Tango, programming books
Posted in Learn to Tango With D, Tango | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
We were hoping to keep this under the radar for a little bit longer, but thanks to comments in a post at reddit the cat is already out of the bag. A couple of times on this blog I’ve mentioned, in passing, a project I was involved in but didn’t give any details about it. Kris Bell, Lars Ivar Igesund, Sean Kelly, and myself have been collaborating over the past few months on a book to be published by Apress, Learn to Tango with D.
The book is part of an Apress series called firstPress. Books in this series are rather short and serve as an introduction to and overview of emerging tech. Successful firstPress books potentially open the door for more in-depth books to be published by Apress down the road. We had a limited budget of pages to squeeze everything into, so much of the book is a fairly rapid, high-level view of what D and Tango are all about. We did, though, meet the primary goal of introducing both D and Tango and went into enough detail to get newcomers started.
We hadn’t announced the book yet for a couple of reasons. First, while it has been available for preorder on both the Apress site and Amazon for some time, we were wanting to get the information describing the book, and the author histories, updated first. That hasn’t happened quite yet, though it is in the pipe. Secondly, the book was originally scheduled for publication in December as both pages indicate, but a few weeks ago publication was pushed back to early 2008. We haven’t yet gotten a firm date, so we wanted to have that before saying anything about it. larsivi had wanted to announce at the D Conference, but the lack of a date was why he didn’t.
Walter wrote the foreward and Don Clugston was our technical reviewer. There are a total of eight chapters, each author having contributed two. The first half of the book covers D and the second half Tango. Personally, I’m quite happy with the result. With each of us being first time authors, it’s been quite the learning experience. The people at Apress have been great in putting up with us. In hindsight, I can think of a handful of things I wish I had mentioned in my chapter on the basics of D, but it’s already the longest chapter in the book!
I hope the book will be on the shelves in January, but that’s not for me to say. As soon as I get a firm date, I’ll be sure to post it here. In the meantime, you can preorder Learn to Tango With D from Amazon at a discount off of the list price. I should also mention that all of the authors agreed to donate all royalties from Apress to the Tango project, so purchases will ultimately benefit the project directly (though, that doesn’t apply to anything I make from Amazon when you purchase through the link above 
).
I’ll post any news related to the book here as I get it. I’ve added a new tag so that you can easily find updates about it. The editing process is ongoing, so I’ll wait until I’m certain about the final chapter titles and such before posting a TOC.
Technorati Tags: D Programming Language, Tango, programming books
Posted in D Programming, Learn to Tango With D, News, Tango | 8 Comments »