It reminds me of an incident involving an old colleague of mine at some kind of graduate recruitment fair thing. He walked past a stand which was trying to hire engineers which had some code on the wall when the following exchange happened:

   Recruiter: Hey there! <indicates the code> Do you know what this is?
   Colleague: Err, <looks…thinks for a bit>… It *looks* like some sort of network protocol
   Recruiter: <smug> No, it’s *COMPUTER CODE*

Its crazy to me how little effort publishers put into the basic parts of their job sometimes. Its even funnier that raymond chen of all people is the one calling this out

I wonder if the book itself is actually any good.

My understanding is that authors often have little or not control over the covers chosen by their publishers.

It's at least possible that the book itself is excellent, but I'm not going to spend $90+ on a hardcover copy to find out.

The cover does not matter for a textbook.

Most textbooks sold are bought by students because they were required for a course. Students are not choosing a textbook by cover because they're not choosing a textbook at all. Professors choosing which textbook to assign are doing so based on the content, because that's what they'll be teaching. Professors also get a lot of free sample copies, and are probably choosing between those instead of purchasing their own set of candidates based on the cover.

At least the JavaScript image is excusable since most implementations are made in C++.

Plot twist: the publisher just looked into the future. I’m currently building an EBNF parser for my project, C³ (C cubed), which allows you to define arbitrary grammar at the very beginning of a file to seamlessly mix strings and syntax from Python, JS, or any custom DSL.

While C++ was just a simple iteration, C³ aims to be a paradigm shift. If you see JavaScript DOM manipulation code on a C++ book cover, it’s not a stock photo blunder anymore — it’s just a valid source file after a custom EBNF header. The project is currently in private development, but I'm considering launching it as an online service. Stay tuned!

https://gitlab.com/9o1d/C3v3

This post discusses the topic and makes several key observations.

We have always had slop.

There have always been people trying to push low-effort, low-value things as high-value things by copying the superficial aspects of high-value things. People literally do "judge a book by its cover", and can be tricked into buying it even when the contents are worthless.

People in a bookshop don't want to have to read entire chapters of each book they're thinking of buying in order to be sure they're all legitimate books of value. They want the bookseller to have done that for them, and know every book in the shop had at least some effort put into it.

The internet is not a bookshop. An enshittified platform like Amazon is not a bookshop. If a slopmaker can pay a platform to tout absolute slop, you now can't trust the platform. It's all so tiresome.

It's now just easier to perform that dishonesty and waste even more people's time than ever before.

A clear case of human slop.

i so wanted it to be the cover of stroustrup book :P

fwiw, i stopped keepin up with c++ in 2003. saved my sanity!

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