Book Review: CLI

Review

Title: CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces

Author(s): Derick Schaefer

Presentation quality is a bit subpar: In general, formatting is what you would expect from a technical book: titles, notes/remarks, code blocks,... All those are fine. But then, the diagrams look like made from UNICODE characters, with a different font and varying quality. And then, the tables: the tables are raw, unprocessed ASCII drawings!

An example, from the book creation notes (so, not disclosing any relevant content):

It looks like the book processing software broke when rendering tables. Maybe they are on purpose like that, but it makes me think that the book didn't pass much quality control.

The code examples are not bad, but way too small and simple. At times, they lack some context, feel incomplete, or contain wrong/obsolete comments, e.g. mentioning a variable nowhere to be seen in the code block.

The font used in the book is also noticeably big, sometimes too much. I wouldn't usually care much, except that for a 220 pages book, it means that the actual content is less than what it looks. The huge font situation also hinders reading the code blocks.

There are many chapters, but often shallow, more like introductions or basic pointers to the topic at hand. A few chapters are as short as 3 pages long (and then factor in the big font...). Gives a general feeling of breadth, instead of depth.

And my last critic is that about part 5, analyzing multiple CLI tools, is a bit disappointing: great tools like gh get a few basic comments instead of a deep-dive, while wp-cli gets more pages with detailed explanations of less relevant features like plugin checksums. Except for a few comments, I felt that in general, you would learn more by directly installing the tools and playing with them.

The book also contains valuable content, specially best practices and testing strategies. It is just that, at least in my case, those became a few notes, not much value extracted.

Conclusion

I use CLI tools intensively every day, and have built a few ones during my life. I had high hopes of this book teaching me some cool or advanced techniques, and what I got was a good overview, with a few good pointers (e.g. I need to test the cobra Go library). It was mostly a validation that my own past research and experience in how tools like gh are structured was adequate.