Books and information technology.

This article won't be very interesting for people living in an English speaking country: most technology books are written in (or at least translated to) English. However, things change if you do live in a country where English is not the main language (like Italy) and most people can't read English comfortably (again, like Italy).

A lot of people working in the IT field here find it more difficult to read in English than in Italian, and they choose books translated in Italian, if they are available.

I prefer English books: they usually cost less and there are no translation errors (by definition). Moreover, there are less errors in general, since more people read the book (and thus has the opportunity to find and report errors). Famous hackers and scientists from all the world usually speak English (and deliver lectures in English): they also tend to write books in English (even if it is not their main language).

Moreover, there are subjects where the translated books (for example Python books in Italy) are *not* the 'best' books on the subject. For example in Italy you can buy 'Programmare in Python' (that is the translation of Learning Python) or the *very* old 'Python 2.1 Tutto ed oltre' (that refers to Python 2.1 and is still being sold). Python in a Nutshell (whose author *is* Italian) is not available, and the list of 'missing' titles is much longer.

In a country like Italy, availability of books on a particular technology can be one of the main reasons why that technology is adopted. In fact a lot of Microsoft books (or books on Microsoft products) are translated (or even written from scratch in Italian by Italians). Another language that fills whole bookcases in our bookshops is Java. PHP has a lot of beginners books, too.

In my opinion none of the aforementioned programming environments excels. Java has a beautiful library (although terribly over-engineered) and a very promising VM, but the language itself sucks. PHP has a horrible library, a terrible Virtual Machine and the language itself sucks even more. .Net has a wonderful VM (but unfortunately not cross-platform -- a part from Mono), but C# is not better than Java, and VB... luckily enough you can run a recent Python version in the .Net environment, but again, you don't find a lot (if any) of information about this in Italian books.

Every time a new programmer goes to a bookshop to buy a book to start learning programming, he is very likely to find a book on Java/MS/PHP. And until he 'grows' up, and learns to look for pieces of information in other places, he will be bound to those technologies. In fact she could have learned sooner (and having more fun) if she discovered Rails (for Web development) or Python. There *are* some books on those subjects (and a whole free book -- but in English -- on Django (a Python Rails-like framework), however, they are a few, and someone who starts looks for 'big names'.