It was noted in the forums that programming books have the worst covers in the world. And it’s true. I’m sure there’s some clever reason for them sucking – but I’m also sure that most people would rather have a blank cover.
Programming books
– December 9, 2009
My C++ Books don’t look like that. lol Maybe it’s just the publishing company.
Personally, I Haven’t really seen that bad looking programming books even in the library here.
The books have always been white or some colored with some other dull shade, don’t really know whether it’s better or not but I really couldn’t bother to care either.
- Manning Publications Co. uses old sketches as cover pictures mostly because it gives their book an uniform feel. Technically the reason they give is “Our covers are understated, decorated with pictures of worldwide regional dress habits of two hundred years ago.”, more info @ http://www.manning.com/about/index.html
- O’Reilly likes really terrible metaphoric puns; “Edie Freeman, O’Reilly’s Creative Director, has created these covers since their inception. She reads the reports about the book, its audience, and its topic, and she picks a woodcut (usually) of an animal that she finds appropriate. The connection between the Surinam Toad and annoyances is pretty clear, but for some other books, the connection is a little more obscure. (My favorite lately, by the way, is the pig on Stopping Spam.) Sometimes a review of the Colophon can reveal the characteristics that led Edie to choose a particular animal.” Source @ http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/frank/animals.html
- In general, making good covers for programming books is hard. If you try to task cover art designer to make a cover for a book about programming, he’ll just come up with some really cheeky “look at me pointing at this word document on this CRT monitor” or flaming keyboards (like this one, one of my study books from couple years ago http://www.bookplus.fi/media-dynamic/images/product/00/04/31/81/12/1/harju-jukka-tuloksellinen-java-ohjelmointi.jpg) which are sort of cute but hugely inaccurate and out of context.
PS. Interestingly you picked the Stackoverflow.com fame Jon Skeet’s C# book as the first example. Intentional?
Those scare me
Seriously, how can you not love that shit?
Most all of my programming books are from the publisher SAMS. Normal Covers, and really well written material.
Animals seem to be a recurring theme here.
if I were a publisher of programming books, they would be things like a guy wearing a bow-tie and nothing else riding a narwhal with laser eyes and star trek nacelles flying through a representation of the Internet slashing it to bit with a sword/tesla coil.
If they had appealing covers they would be sued for false advertising.
stumbled
Thay could at the very least do something similar to the programming language
It’s like they just flip through clip art and say “Yeah, that’ll do.”
@Chris: So, like most programmer designed UIs then?
That said, Apress don’t have half bad covers by programming book standards.
Best…Covers…Ever!
is this a joke or something cause I lmfao at the last one.
The last one is fake methinks.
Yeah, ive got a JAVA book with a hummingbird and some bamboo sketched on it (in print, not pencil sketch)
Ah ha! I got on garry’s blog!
Boring software was my post :smug:
Omg! I have the third edition of absolute C++ and it still has those lions… :O it’s greenish yellow though.
http://book.pdfchm.com/c-concurrency-in-action-practical-multithreading-17135/
Offtopic: I like the new template garry
No man, ur wrong.
O’Reilly covers are bad ass.
Garry, you forgot the best one!
http://bsx.ru/~gong/lj/atari-forth.jpg
Whoa, programming books don’t usually have good covers, no (eccept my Game Programming book, it has pretty stars and galaxies!), but I haven’t seen any like those – that’s bad to the extreme…
fasd