I think there's a distinction to made in this discussion between mainframe application programmers (ie cobol, anyone taking intro courses at an IBM sponsored sc

I think there's a distinction to made in this discussion between mainframe application programmers (ie cobol, anyone taking intro courses at an IBM sponsored school) and system programmers ie the guys setting up and writing site integration stuff ie the guys these books are ttargeted toward. Similar to php vs people writing drivers in your example. Unfortunately this distinction is rarely delinated in these threads.