Poor spot for a typo

[tn3270]

Have been using Perl/Regex quite a bit to convert one programming language into another. This has been going quite well, and I have been using the power of regex heavily. Today I was looking at a Perl book for some quirk of regexes, and one example looked really wrong. After puzzling a bit, I realized there was a typo in the regex syntax. That is just plain cruel; although regexes are very powerful, they tend to look like gibberish anyhow, even without a typographical error. I bet most copy editors do not review the regex syntax. Its a pretty hard problem, even a good technical reviewer would have a chore to check all the regexes in a book that had a lot of them (most Perl books).

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

It's hard to check for, but that's no excuse.

I like the "Pragmatic Programmer"'s suggestion: however you write your book, it has a compile stage where it integrates your code snippets with your text -- and does unit tests on your code. Unit tests are not very useful in general, but for tiny code snippets? They should be trivial.

But more annoying (although not nearly as bad!) are things like what I have found in "Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion MX7 Application Development". At one point they note that one of the advantages of clustering was "very expensive". Oooh, yeah.