>You're free not to buy books through their affiliate links.
You're only free to do this if you know that it's an issue. Unless you know about the affiliate program, you may be supporting this person against your own will. Even if you do know about the affiliate program, you may not know that after you click an affiliate link, the owner of the code gets a chunk of ANY Amazon purchase you make in the next 24 hours, whether or not it is related to the original link.
I just finished The Phoenix Project recently, and I thought it was great. It is effectively a novel about a large software project which is being mismanaged and on the brink of failure, and the steps that the team (and related teams) took to save it from the grips of death. The point of the book seems to be to explain the types of situations that are improved by focusing on devops and agile development.
Personally, this book really hit home, as I had recently left a team/project much like the one described in the book, however I think anyone working on a software project at a decent sized company will be able to relate to many of the problems presented early in the book.
Nearly every submission you've ever made to reddit is either directly to your book, or to a post on your blog, most of which include a massive ad at the bottom for your book. That's spam. Even if there was no ad on your blog and you receive no compensation in any way, it's still spam.
You used to (still do?) spam this heavily on the programming subreddit. It annoys me to see that it's selling rather well, yet you apparently can't be bothered to buy an ad.
That defeats half the purpose though, because if the string is null, you won't be able to call the method without throwing an exception. Or is that not the case for extension methods?
You may want to leave it in. As another user mentioned, the official stable release is still 1.9. It does warn you that the default will change in 2.0, and prompts you to decide whether or not you want to keep "matching" as the default, but the version that most people will be working on won't have "simple" set as default yet.
Not to mention HDCP. The first time I tried out Prime streaming, I turned off my second monitor after starting up the video, and Amazon took that to mean that I was a criminal, and that my video should be stopped.
This seems like a rather hostile change to an already hostile community. HN has never felt like a welcoming place to me, and I don't think this will help. Maybe PG prefers the community to be small, so he's trying to trim it down? Because I'm fairly certain this will drive users away, and not just the ones he wants to keep out.
Please noble 1000+ers, free my humble comment from the depths of the low-karma peasants. For I have but 522 karma, thus I deserve to be spat on and excluded from the flawless utopia which is the HN comments section...
>How do they ensure that teachers know what they're talking about?
AFAIK, they don't. There was a big fiasco recently when some guy who was teaching a C++ course was featured as "course of the week" or something, which got posted to /r/programming, and they basically tore him to shreds.
A lot of people were claiming that some of the problems were nit-picky, but there were certainly some significant issues with the code. It was the sort of stuff that someone who read C++ Primer probably wouldn't do, but someone who read "How To Program C++ in 21 Days for Dummies: the Absolute Moron's Guide" might.
The presentation was pretty terrible too, but that doesn't necessarily speak towards whether he knows what he's talking about.
WPF is definitely the way to go. I started a modest sized project a few years ago at an internship, and this past summer I was allowed the task to move it from Forms to WPF. Let me tell you, working with WPF is so much better. Especially when you get into anything custom. Custom drawing in Forms is always a hack, and you basically have to do it in code. WPF is essentially designed to make creating custom controls with custom drawing incredibly easy.
Not to mention all the awesome databinding stuff, and now with async in C# 5, it's easier than ever to create responsive UI. Just reading about the async stuff had me thinking back to that project, saying "yeah, that would make [some chunk of the code] a lot more intelligible".
I contribute a lot in the /r/learnprogramming subreddit, and when new programmers are asking about UI with C#, I generally suggest just skipping Forms. There's really no reason to use it anymore. I can't believe I used it so long while WPF was right there, ready to free me of the Forms peril.
You're only free to do this if you know that it's an issue. Unless you know about the affiliate program, you may be supporting this person against your own will. Even if you do know about the affiliate program, you may not know that after you click an affiliate link, the owner of the code gets a chunk of ANY Amazon purchase you make in the next 24 hours, whether or not it is related to the original link.