There is an increasing trend in which certain reasonably educated individuals in the computer software industry have decided to take it upon themselves to endeavor into a mildy annoying, carelessly destructive, and decidedly irresponsible realm: that of unathorized authorization. By this I mean to say that these people have taken the normally enormous leap from practitioners to preachers without the required accreditation or ability. Armed with a semi-comprehensive understanding of a certain field, they set out to write a book that details their murky understanding of well-known central pillars that wouldn’t be news to any other software developer worth his or her salary.
In any established technical industry you will be able to find books and information about the practices and tools of the industry, detailing methods and caveats, best practices, ethics, external considerations, and a seemingly neverending wealth of other things you always never wanted to know. The difference here being that in other technical industries, the guides are more often than not written by a person with a “Ph.D.” suffix. These are the kind of people that have a doctorate because they possess an undying passion for their work and have unbelievably exhaustive knowledge, experience, and wisdom to offer back to the newbies entering that same industry. Other walks of life also consistently exhibit this architecture where the learned and wise teach the young and impressionable; not because it’s some stagnant tradition without reason, or a monopoly over control of the press, but because it’s the logical way of things. It is in the best interest of all parties involved if you actually know what you’re talking about before you start to misguide the masses with your carelessness.
Now, back to the issue at hand. I say the computer software industry, but it is most prevalent in the web development field, most specifically that sector involved with web applications using JavaScript, the DOM, CSS, XHTML, and friends. People that have experience in other, completely unrelated, software fields come into the web applications arena and slap together a few articles, write a kludgy app or two, coin a few buzzwords, and write The Definitive Guide on the latest new amazing technology that happens to be almost ten years old.
The only reasons that this trend has continued to sustain itself are, firstly, that the web applications development field is relatively immature field compared to, say, processor design, and secondly that there aren’t any definitive guides out there already. Publishers are chomping at the bit to get something out there because they know it will sell–it has to because that’s all there is. Nevermind those silly things like knowledge, experience, and wisdom; as long as someone wants to buy it, you should write it!
It goes without saying that this trend is harmful to the beginning developers that truly wish to excel in the field. All of this starts to bother me when I want to learn more and help others learn the real best practices, but then I remember that this is the Internet: check your accountability and responsibility at the door.
The magazines Computerworld and, to a lesser extent, Game Developer Magazine would be good examples of the periodical version of this tripe. One issue of GDM even had a guide to writing a cover letter that made me think of HS English class. “Intelligent Solutions for Ambiguos Player Controls” was essentially six pages of this editor talking about how confusing the timing of jumps are to players. He started spitting out the phrase “disambiguation rules” and called for some vague grand unified theory of control timings but offerend no real solutions or possibilities of solutions to his “problem.” (I say GDM isn’t as bad because they have a section called “Postmortem” that is written not by their editors but by actual developers.)
[...] This is an old political tactic that has shown is power in several situations (the world is flat, WMD in Iraq, etc.). In order to figure out what’s really going on, we appeal to the people who know what they’re doing. The people that know the most about global warming, something involving earth science, are (surprise!) scientists. This goes back to my post about Ph.D.’s knowing what they’re doing because they are well-educated in a specific field and have an intense passion for their work. [...]
[...] The second and most troublesome problem found in toolkits and in the web application field in general is the poor quality of the JS code. The developers who set out to write toolkits and libraries are often the same developers who are trying to gain entry into the field and who are just learning JS. These developers most often lack experience and expertise with dynamic languages or JS specifically and end up writing poor quality code. Although the numbers are on the rise now that the web application field has been highlighted for over a year, the number of developers who have the neccessary experience and architectural knowledge to write high quality toolkits or libraries for mass consumption is still startlingly small. [...]