Re: Why I've returned

On Jan 1, 8:04 am, spinoza1111 <spinoza1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've returned because the treatment of Herb Schildt's books in this
thread in 2000,
<snip>
I ask Heathfield, as the self-appointed leader and enabler of so much
bullying here, bullying which makes this newsgroup useless as an Open
University style learning tool to people all over the world excluded
from higher education, and which may be intended to make it so, to
apologize for his conduct. I ask Howard to apologize for his conduct.
If they cannot do so, I ask them to leave.

Richard Heathfield, to my knowledge, has never appointed
himself leader of any newsgroup, nor is he viewed as a leader
in any way. His posts may often be interpreted as "bullying",
but I believe that is an incorrect interpretation
and your characterization of him is inaccurate. This
newsgroup and others in which he participates are hardly
useless.

I retained the context in which you mention Schildt's book
to point out that I for one am very glad for RH's
critiques of that book. It is not a complete pile of rubbish,
but it is pretty close. One of the most difficult
tasks in learning to design software is determining
who to pay attention to and who to ignore. One valuable
tool to do that job is to see other people's criticisms
of books, articles, etc. Schildt's book may be slightly
useful for a complete beginner to programming, but
it is NOT a good text, and will probably do more harm
than good. A newbie, learning from Schildt's text
will undoubtedly learn just enough to be extremely
dangerous, but will develop many bad habits.
If you are incapable of recognizing the poor quality
of that text, then you are clearly not someone
to whom much time should be devoted.

(Apologies to the group at large. It is fairly
clear that spinoza is a troll, but I thought
someone should present a rebuttal to this
attempted character assassination.)

.