What is your opinion on the nostarch manga guides?

Fan translation when?

Is it a reasonable thing to do to split a formatting string like that?

Yes, it's the standard convention for using macros in string constants.

How would you go about making the numbers in format specifiers variable at runtime? Or do they need to be constant at runtime?

yea, no

You just edit a string and then use that string which you just modified as your format string. Keep in mind that if the user is able to control the format string that you might have a format string vulnerability.

I don't think that things such as format strings should be modified directly based on user input. Much rather program logic should modify them in a well-defined and predictable manner only after user input has been parsed (assuming user input may have relevant influence).

There's nothing arcane about the psql or mysql CLI tools, unless maybe you don't understand the very basics of Unix shell.

Database thread:

oh seriously