Re: http://gnustep.org/resources/BookClarifications.html

[rixstep001]

> > Good of you to put Aaron 'Hill of Gas' down. He's a charlatan of the 
> > first rank and his ambition to sully your name had a lot of us very 
> > angry.

> I have mixed feelings about this. We were glad to have a chapter in 
> such a prominent cocoa book at all (and to have replaced the Java 
> chapter, no less!) but you are not the first to have claimed 'Hill o' 
> Gas' is a charlatan. I don't think he was intentionally out to sully 
> our name, but he sure wasn't very nice to us either. The mere fact 
> that we've got a chapter is an accomplishment, IMHO, and in the future 
> we make take on more relevance within that comminuty.
>
> Evidently, before the chapter went to press, it was sent to Adam Fedor 
> (our project admin) for strict factual review. At the time I was 
> unaware of this and I do wish it had been more widely distributed 
> because a few outright falsehoods would have then been avoided. You 
> can thank Greg Casamento, the author of Gorm and the individual who 
> put together the BookClarifications page, for his work on reviewing 
> the chapter.
>
> Cheers,
> Alex Perez
> GNUstep.org co-maintainer

Hi Alex!

And nice of you to reply. You're spot-on in having mixed feelings.

We were never under the impression Aaron was much the programmer or 
teacher. He's a lot of hype and image but his texts - and most likely 
his courses - give very little to the readers and students. We've been 
teaching programming courses for a looong time and most of the texts, 
no matter who writes them, have a few things in common, such as API 
overviews and the like, and the good courses and books must give the 
student real life examples so that new skills can be applied 
immediately. Finally, there is never any excuse for bad program design, 
and Aaron's writings are riddled with silly ideas that would not get 
out of Comp. Sci. 101 with a passing grade.

When we remarked to him about the typos in his book, his response was 
classic Aaron:

'Take my course - it costs $3500.'

But no, we wouldn't dream of being so stupid, and fortunately there is 
a good text on the market, although the Hill of Gas marketing machine 
is shadowing it. It's a very very very good book.

http://cocoaprogramming.net

No other book is needed. Granted, it is not GNUstep, but it is 
programming, and we'd assume it's much of the same thing even today.

*

We have to say we really like what you people at GNUstep are doing. 
We're running Apple but we're not Mac users so to speak. Our sole point 
of interest is Objective-C and NeXTSTEP. We want to see both 
technologies proliferate, as we think programming in general would 
improve everywhere. There is too much bad code in the industry right 
now, unfortunately: the grunts have bad tools. So that's our stake in 
it all.

It's hard to see what Aaron possibly wanted to win by his 'move' on 
GNUstep, but we know a bit about him and his kind - they lurk all over 
the Apple message boards - they're there but rarely come to the surface 
LOL - and also, the guy just isn't all that sharp. I suspect a lot of 
what he wrote is just 'headline syndrome': he got to the headlines - 
the surface of it all - and just didn't dig any deeper. A bad research 
habit if there ever was one.

I think we'll have to publish news of this in a number of places. In a 
newsletter to warn people off about the summabitch again, and online 
for an update to our 'not too kind' review of his book. <G>

So anyway, thanks so much for writing, and do keep up the good work, 
and if there is anything at all you suspect we might be able to help 
out with, drop a line.

High regards,

Rick Downes