The subtitle “A reference manual for people who design and build software” seems at odds with the description:
> This book won’t teach you how to actually make software […] It’s a manual that explains how the things you use everyday actually work.
You don’t need to be technical to read this - there are a lot of pictures and diagrams to do the heavy lifting. You just need to be curious.
It's like there was a shift in goals after the author made the title. Maybe explaining the basics was so much fun, that the initial idea got lost... I also don't think knowing how a crt monitor works is instrumental for people who want to make software. The domain is cool, but it doesn't match the content. whatissoftware.com might be better.
when it is explained how pixel, gpu or llm work, I would at least expect some intro to Von-Neumann-Architecture.
Stunningly beautiful landing page. I would never normally comment on the aesthetics of anything in the dev sphere but that completely blew me away. I'll preorder for sure.
I'd echo the other comment mentioning that a coffee-table version of this would be great.
Agreed, it's aesthetically beautiful. It should be a coffee table book. But for the web, it has terrible usability. Really, really terrible in multiple ways. My comments will be harsh, but since the creator is obviously very skilled, he should know better.
Why multicolumn text? So it looks like an old printed manual? At first view, it's not clear where the first column ends. This is not something we see on the web (because there's no need for it), so it's not clear that the content flows from one column to the next. When the viewport is sized to two columns, I need to scroll down to finish the first column, then scroll back up to read where it continues on the second column.
Justified text is bad on the web. We're starting to get some better features to make it usable, but it's not widely supported, so right ragged text is always more readable.
There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.
I'm sure there are more issues but the site is so unusable for me, I won't continue trying.
So, yeah. It's gorgeous design. I love it. But it's for the sake of aesthetics, not for the user's sake. It's completely unusable to me. Since this is the first installment, I hope the designer will keep the aesthetics but improve the usability in future installments.
Beause in print you would typically use your publishing software to adjust various things, like where hypenated word breaks should happen. This is much trickier in digital media, and usually just isn't done, resulting in ugly word spacing.
> Justified text is bad on the web. ...so right ragged text is always more readable.
I disagree. I like justified text on the web as well as in print. To me, jagged right hand side of the text column is more disturbing than uneven spaces between words. So, you cannot universally declare that justified text is an accessibility issue.
I believe this will be fixed by this year - you have smart hyphenation going to come natively in CSS. It was always possible using the JS hyphenator lib.
I agree that they are beautiful and detailed, clearly illustrating the point. I really, really love them. I'd love to have them on my wall.
That's not my problem. My problem is that they never stop animating. For me and many other people, when something is moving in our visual field, it is very, very difficult to read the text next to it.
Full disclosure: I'm autistic. I was wondering whether I should mention that. All the issues that I mentioned exclude me from using this resource. So maybe we could call these accessibility issues instead of usability issues. When I disclose that I'm autistic, it tends to evoke two types of responses:
1) Oh, sorry, we'll make it accessible. But they do it out of shame, which I don't like. I'd rather it's out of empathy.
2) You're too small of a segment to care about.
But I'm beginning to think that the only difference between usability and accessibility is the size of the population that's being excluded by the design. I chose to keep my autisticness separate to see how people responded when I presented this as a usability issue instead of an accessibility issue.
I'm only asking that designers have empathy for all possible users of their media. That's all. That's what good design is supposed to do.
I hope you didn’t think I meant to imply that this is only bad for autistic people. I know that many other people have the same issues. But when I mention these problems to people that don’t have difficulty, sometimes they assume it’s just me and a tiny minority.
Probably got a lot of neurospicy folks here on Hackernews, so there's less of a stigma associated with it, and more people familiar with the kind of sensory issues you deal with.
I feel you. I can't have autocomplete on when I'm coding, partly because having video game stuff happening in my field of view while I'm trying to focus throws me off. I'd rather just remember the name.
There has to be a middle ground though. For instance, I am definitely the opposite; I would feel as the site would be less usable to me if it just ran once and I had to reload the page or spam click replay if I wanted to see the animation again. I'd imagine people who are slow readers or with dyslexia would feel the same, and would make similar aurguement that you are making that them auto playing the animation assuming everyone had same reading speed when the animation is in focus are not taking thier cohort in consideration due to the small size of the group. I am sure that there are some colorblindness condition that would find the colors of the site difficult to distinguish as well. I would be be more emphatic to your view point if this was a school/employment/healthcare/goverment document, but it isnt realistic to say a primarily artistic/design project has to cater to everyone's specific accessibility concerns.
They still end up doing that, regardless of the intention. It would be better if they only animated once, or just when you hover over them instead of constantly.
Very nice. The design reminds me of a website that I forgot to bookmark a long while ago, it was about explaining network protocols at the wire level, and it had some of the most amazing visuals that I ever saw. It's a shame that I forgot what it was, and googling doesn't help. If anyone knows what I'm talking about please share the link.
Looks like it might have been VisualLand.net, which isn't around anymore. Looking at the archive of the site (https://web.archive.org/web/20130811073141/http%3A//www.visu...), most of their animations / diagrams were Flash, so no longer run, and don't seem to work with archive.org's emulator either.
No, that's not it unfortunately. It was a single page with a style of diagrams that shows a high-level format of something, with arrows to a zoomed-in version that details the structure of the fields. I remember its colour scheme being dominated by light blue and green, IIRC.
Commendable effort, i would also like to recommend some topics/chapters/lessons whatever you want to call it
- How microprocessors and microcontrollers work
- Types of storage => RAM / ssd/ hdd / flash drives and storage formats NTFS, FAT32
- OS stuff (theading, multiprocessing, coroutines, scheduling, paging, priority)
- Some data structures stuff (trees, stacks, queues, graphs etc)
also would like to add a section about packets, network packets, tcp packets, udp packets, http packets. would be real nice to see what each packet is like in a very visually friendly way
I think it's a cool little easter egg. Goes well with the technical illustration of a 3.5" floppy disk at the top and the pixelated font for the titles.
Also, maybe the author meant to say he started thinking about this book since 1990, too.
Either way the copyright year doesn't matter. You can put anything
Yes, just an announcement. There's an FAQ at the bottom:
>When will it launch?
> I'm not entirely sure yet. I'd love to get it out before the European summer this year. It's a lot of work to illustrate everything so you might need to have some patience.
No chapters are done - it's a bit weird that this fact is buried deep down in the FAQs. I would have expected the fact it's an announcement to be mentioned above the fold.
I really like those illustrations I hope you keep going with this progress. Looks great and I think it could be a very engaging tool because of its visual appeal.
Don't let the haters get to you. Let him cook people.
The pair of animations on the page are beautifully done, not just technically but aesthetically as well. If the rest of the book is like that I'll be getting a copy.
I'm getting the impression that the book will not be organized in any real linear or iterative order, just sections that allow you to jump around and read what you want.
104 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] thread> This book won’t teach you how to actually make software […] It’s a manual that explains how the things you use everyday actually work. You don’t need to be technical to read this - there are a lot of pictures and diagrams to do the heavy lifting. You just need to be curious.
It's like there was a shift in goals after the author made the title. Maybe explaining the basics was so much fun, that the initial idea got lost... I also don't think knowing how a crt monitor works is instrumental for people who want to make software. The domain is cool, but it doesn't match the content. whatissoftware.com might be better.
when it is explained how pixel, gpu or llm work, I would at least expect some intro to Von-Neumann-Architecture.
the subtitle doesnt say what the reference manual is a reference for. just that software people might like it.
Subject: how the things used every day by people who design and build software work
Not the subject: how to design and build software
I'd echo the other comment mentioning that a coffee-table version of this would be great.
https://alcohollick.com/
> Dan Hollick.
> Design, technically.
Blogs about using Figma to create things (like this).
Why multicolumn text? So it looks like an old printed manual? At first view, it's not clear where the first column ends. This is not something we see on the web (because there's no need for it), so it's not clear that the content flows from one column to the next. When the viewport is sized to two columns, I need to scroll down to finish the first column, then scroll back up to read where it continues on the second column.
Justified text is bad on the web. We're starting to get some better features to make it usable, but it's not widely supported, so right ragged text is always more readable.
There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.
I'm sure there are more issues but the site is so unusable for me, I won't continue trying.
So, yeah. It's gorgeous design. I love it. But it's for the sake of aesthetics, not for the user's sake. It's completely unusable to me. Since this is the first installment, I hope the designer will keep the aesthetics but improve the usability in future installments.
Is there any reason why justified is okay printed but not on the web.
I disagree. I like justified text on the web as well as in print. To me, jagged right hand side of the text column is more disturbing than uneven spaces between words. So, you cannot universally declare that justified text is an accessibility issue.
Your other criticism I agree with.
That's not my problem. My problem is that they never stop animating. For me and many other people, when something is moving in our visual field, it is very, very difficult to read the text next to it.
Full disclosure: I'm autistic. I was wondering whether I should mention that. All the issues that I mentioned exclude me from using this resource. So maybe we could call these accessibility issues instead of usability issues. When I disclose that I'm autistic, it tends to evoke two types of responses:
1) Oh, sorry, we'll make it accessible. But they do it out of shame, which I don't like. I'd rather it's out of empathy.
2) You're too small of a segment to care about.
But I'm beginning to think that the only difference between usability and accessibility is the size of the population that's being excluded by the design. I chose to keep my autisticness separate to see how people responded when I presented this as a usability issue instead of an accessibility issue.
I'm only asking that designers have empathy for all possible users of their media. That's all. That's what good design is supposed to do.
I feel you. I can't have autocomplete on when I'm coding, partly because having video game stuff happening in my field of view while I'm trying to focus throws me off. I'd rather just remember the name.
Then it would still loop for you, but not negatively impact people who are using reduced motion settings in their browser/OS.
And pegs the CPU and drains the battery.
Also, maybe the author meant to say he started thinking about this book since 1990, too.
Either way the copyright year doesn't matter. You can put anything
>When will it launch?
> I'm not entirely sure yet. I'd love to get it out before the European summer this year. It's a lot of work to illustrate everything so you might need to have some patience.
I was very excited to go to (and link/reference) Chapter 2: Fonts and Vectors but it doesn't seem to be done yet?
The progress indicator shows that this is only just begun?
Don't let the haters get to you. Let him cook people.
> When your finger gets close to the screen it causes a disturbance in the magnetic field that the electrodes sense.
Sure should be capacitive?
god damn, that's some patient making animation right there
https://typefully.com/DanHollick