Book Review: Master the Visual Studio Code

Introduction:

Mastering Visual Studio Code: A Beginner's Guide is a book by Sufyan bin Uzayr, which as its title suggests, is a book about Visual Studio Code (Here referred to as VS Code.) the book is part of the Master the Computer Science series, and it was released in the December of 2022.

I stumbled on this book when I was searching for a guide that would cover the VS code in depth. Little did I know at that time what I was getting myself into. Needless to say, this review is a result of those experiences I had with this book.

My review:

So, the book starts with a nice intro about its purpose, the introduction to the series, followed by an introduction to the author. Then, we go to the first chapter. And immediately, you hit some obstacles.

First, the odd language. It only starts with strange terms such as “Natural source”, referring to the source code of VS code, to increasingly deteriorating sentence structure. The background of the author gives a clue about this. In his About section, it is mentioned that he has lived in “four countries”. Coupled with his name, it all indicates that English is not his first language. Now, given my history, I suppose I should not hark on him that much for this.

But the thing is, you can read my blog for free. And I always strive to improve myself. The only bottleneck is that I don’t get much feedback because no one leaves any comments.

But this guy? is writing books at an insane rate of pace. Already in this series of Master the Computer Science, there are around thirty books. And they began to be published just last year, according to the information available on the site of Routledge.

No one can write at this pace, and keep the quality. This reflects in this book. due to his bad English, the author has filled the book with the images, which is fine I suppose. It is not like other books aren’t using images to illustrate their concepts. But when every paragraph has an image to accompany it, it just goes to show that the author is failing to communicate.

The first chapter starts with a long comparison of the VS code with other packages, including other text editors and IDEs. I felt it was unnecessary, just one or two comparisons would have been enough. I don’t have any problem with including its history, that just goes to show that the writer has done his research on the piece of software on which he is writing the book.

Unfortunately, the second chapter doesn’t improve any. More figures, more bullet points, artificially enhanced length, and poor delivery of the information. At this point, I decided that I had enough of this book, and decided to drop it.

I usually do not review the books I have dropped. But I thought this time, I had to share this experience with you guys. I kind of feel bad, because this might just perpetuate the belief that if a technical book does not have a sufficiently English-sounding name, it will not be good. because that is what I’ve seen in some of the Amazon reviews I’ve read.

But there is also an important lesson in all of this for me. always look at a series. Because if some guy is writing thirty technical books in under a year, then it is an indicator that the books are of poor quality. I can only imagine what kind of book he has written on Rust, as there is one, he has written about that language. But honestly, I’ve got no interest in reading that one. there are better, and more high-quality books for Rust available all over the market and on the internet for free.

Coming back to my non-native English background, if you say to me, “That your writing sucks! You have no right to criticize someone either!” then my reply would be that at least you don’t have to pay to read my writing. One would think that if someone is asking money for something, then that work would be of at least somewhat high quality. But in the case of this book, it is not true at all.

This also goes to show how loose the publishers have gotten. There is an aura surrounding the published books: that they have to be of excellent quality, that they must go through multiple edits and revisions, that they filter out most of the books, and only publish the highest quality of books. All of this is not true, at least not true as it once used to be.

Publishers are likely to publish any book which is cheap to write and print, regardless of the quality.

Anyway, I’ll just go and cry in the corner for reviewing a book so badly, deserved though it might be. In the meantime, you can leave comments, suggest more books for me to review, and check out my web serial which is here, and the lessons that chess has taught me on my other blog here.