Haute Vulgarisation

It was hard to learn how to write networked programs until I stumbled upon Richard Stevens’ books: I didn’t know their genre then, but I enjoyed them very much.

There are more authors who wrote on complex topics simply. Silvanus Thompson wrote “Calculus Made Easy” and Isaac Asimov wrote “Understanding physics” like this.

Connecting tissue is the language: easy English prose exposing complex topic without dumbing it down. Haute vulgarisation is the name of this writing style. I like it because it has a high ratio of understanding gained to time spent studying. What makes those books so good?

First it’s perhaps the level of mastery of the topic by the author. It’s so rare to find an author who knows a complex topic so well to talk about it, but writing is yet another level of difficulty. And not just write, but write about it simply enough that a group of high-schoolers could understand the subject.

Let’s take Stevens as an example.

He had mastered the topic so completely that the field felt finite. It matters because many books excuse their incompleteness by putting “introduction” right there, in the title, with author apologizing that the field is so large “introduction” is justified. It feels minor until I realize how bold it would be to write a book entitled “The Drumming Book” even after twenty years of playing drums.

In his books, he introduced concepts and vocabulary slowly at first, and used it only when necessary. I grew accustomed to the sound of new terms, and as I was a third of the way, once foreign terms became my friends. This is a large contrast with introductory math books whose first sentence starts with “Let n be..”. Those feel like waiting on a bus stop. His felt like being in someone’s living room.

He used examples. A lot of examples. The Polish edition I used came in two volumes, thousand pages each, but it was because more than half of the volume’s pages were easy programs that acted as the companion to the words. The abstract topic was immediately put to motion by showing me something practical that I could immediately test myself, tinker with it and tweak it to see differnet result.

He also illustrated his books very well. In “TCP/IP Illustrated” volume 2 (the title of the Polish edition was “TCP/IP Bible”) of more than 1500 pages, he put hundreds of illustrations, hundreds of code snippets and the rest was pure English prose. It is as if he knew some part of population are visual thinkers, and he cathered to both readers and watchers.

I often wonder why we don’t have more books like this?

To start with, there aren’t many people who want to be authors. People who study networked programs or physics in 2026 are engineers. They want to solve a problem at work and move on; perhaps even solve without understanding. They aren’t trying to give up jobs to explain topics further.

Perhaps it’s because understanding the complex topic requires exceptional effort, and then to explain it to the general audience requires divine skill. One needs to escape their head, forget all the learnt terms, meanings and connections and put yourself in the reader’s mind, just to then see the topic again, but with their fresh eyes.

We also have a chicken and egg problem: if we have no good books, how the “candidate author” learns the topic before they are ready to explain it? It must have been a royal pain for Stevens to learn network programming.

What works is learning about sources and common characteristics of good books that are easy to understand. I found Brian Kernighan’s books partly because Stevens mentioned them, but perhaps more because Stevens books looked beautiful. He had a peculiar way of typesetting his books, talked about it, and then I found Kernighan though the Internet when doing research on typesetting. Perhaps this is a hint: when you want to learn the topic, find the book that works for you and then you will find more books that work equally well.

Those books are way more fun to read, since you can absorb a topic smoothly, without a book feeling like a paper brick, and without vocabulary indigestion.

It’s possible that the books I like to read are the books that the author had fun writing. Asimov quit his professor job to write full-time (and he released dozens of books over dozens of years with remarkable consistency.)

If you know any good books of this type in your field, email me.