I indeed find the formatting quality of the site to be superior. As mentioned below by the author.<p>"""
I know some people don’t like AI. Without it, this book wouldn’t exist. The book is free, so if AI bothers you more than the resulting product might benefit you, please ignore this book.<p>Using Claude made me realize how many compromises I’ve made on books in the past. I would get a good idea about something (for example, automatically interleaving commented output in the listings). I either couldn’t implement it, or it seemed too hard, so I didn’t do it. But with AI I can explore and often implement every whim, from things as seemingly straightforward as inserting a new chapter to ones as daunting as that commented-output system. The result is much better than anything I managed before. I keep going until I’ve tweaked everything that occurs to me.
"""
I originally learned Java in 2000 from Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Java"
is there anything like this for clang?
"The book targets Python 3.15 and later"<p>That's a bit weird, Python 3.15 isn't even fully released yet.
You're right that Python 3.15 is not fully released yet, but it's in prerelease which is defined as:<p>"""
After the first beta, no new features can go in, but feature fixes (including significant changes to new features), bug fixes, and security fixes are accepted for the upcoming feature release.
"""<p>So it's a fairly well known target. Bruce Eckel published the first edition of this book a quarter of a century ago - he has a pretty good handle on the progression of Python.<p>Definitions and status for all releases is at <a href="https://devguide.python.org/versions/" rel="nofollow">https://devguide.python.org/versions/</a>
Since this is autogenerated, is it possible that it's going to be auto updated as new versions of python come out? That'd be pretty cool. It'd be interesting to see this kind of thing unfold itself into a book.<p>When I feed it into an LLM, do you think it's going to improve the output of the code, or will it need additional prompting?
This is actually an interesting idea...<p>Especially if it gives us an insight into what prompts were given to generate something we approve of vs. something we disapprove.
Care to provide some examples? Would certainly add to the discussion
The "Thinking in" series shaped how an entire generation learned to program. What made those books work wasn't the language coverage, it was that Eckel focused on mental models rather than syntax reference. You came away understanding how to think about the language, not just how to write it. Curious whether that approach translates well to Python, which arguably has a less opinionated object model than Java did.
Where can I get a physical copy of this?
I think what people call 'AI slop' is probably just unedited content. I actually like this content quite a bit. Rather than whether it was made with AI, I think what matters is whether it accurately matches the specification
Not just unedited but what feels like low information density...<p>For eg. If you're generating a whole document with a single prompt, say "write a document on how to implement this"<p>vs.<p>"Find various approaches to implement this. These are the approaches we already have. These are the constraints we currently have."<p>Then verify the generated text, remove useless hallucinations. Use the same AI to verify the generated output.
Actually, isn't GPT-generated(or Gen AI) text much more information-dense than human writing? The challenge with AI prompts is that they don't produce consistent results due to various factors—from AI memory to Agent.md and other influences. I think the difference between AI and human writing is density. When AI generates informational content, it tends to have much deeper density. But where that density is directed seems to depend on the prompt.<p>For example, if you say 'write a blog post automatically,' it tends to produce low-density, verbose text. But if you say 'find counterexamples based on this paper and that paper,' it generates highly dense sentences.
[flagged]