Yes, but chances are you'd have a fairly static set. For serverside, you'd have K&R, Stroustrup or the Sun Java books, W Richard Stevens, perhaps Design & Impl

Yes, but chances are you'd have a fairly static set. For serverside, you'd have K&R, Stroustrup or the Sun Java books, W Richard Stevens, perhaps Design & Implementation of BSD and maybe a domain book or two and you're good to go - for years and years. There'd perhaps be some ludicrously expensive object library that's needed for some domain detail - but it was bought as 1.9, and will stay 1.9 forever because ludicrously expensive and management. You didn't much care that there was a new C++ or C standard release, until addison Wesley put out the book to go with it and management got around to buying tech the relevant updates. Now you're mucking about with serverside and there's 20 different technologies, all being updated and security patched constantly. The project you did 6 months ago relies on some deprecated function set, and the prev release of SomeThing and PostreSQL, and half a dozen other toolsets and libraries. The next project is going to use WizzyNewTech0.8 as well. You either Google constantly, or fail and go crazy. There were advantages to the 90s - you'd have newsgroups for support that were free of spam, and full of techies. You could spend much more time solving actual problems than mucking about deciding on and changing the framework set. You didn't get pwned by 0 days if you didn't update your tech constantly either.