I've noticed a lot of issues in the Kindle version of Learn C the hard way. Should I just stick with the website version and ignore the kindle book for now, or is there an errata page?
1 Answers
Yes, the kindle is terrible for programming books unless you're using it on something like an iPad so the rendering is good. The problem is the original kindle format was for fiction books and borrowed from Palm. That meant it was designed to run on variable sized screens so they made a format that "flows" to fit.
"Flowing" text to fit completely mangles code layout, so the "solution" was to render ... every single code block as an image. This turns out to be so difficult that Amazon provides teams of hundreds to assist the big publishers with the problem of supporting all the various Kindles that have been produced.
Meanwhile, if you go to my site you just get a nearly perfectly laid out text and code, with color, and you select text to tell me it's wrong. Just select, right click, choose "link to highlight" then put that in a bug report and I can go directly to it and fix it.
So yeah, don't use kindle for programming books. It sucks. It's also why I don't bother with PDF anymore. Just too hard to support all the crazy PDF renderers out there.
