Hm I think you might be misunderstanding what kind of book we're talking about. I think it's helpful to divide computer books into 2 categories: those with a s

Hm I think you might be misunderstanding what kind of book we're talking about. I think it's helpful to divide computer books into 2 categories: those with a short shelf-life and those with a long shelf-life. Most (all?) O'Reilly books are in the former category. They probably sell 90% of their volume in the first couple years (at least one comment in this thread said something like that). How many copies a year do you think jQuery books are selling right now? Especially if they haven't been updated since 2009? Are publishers even asking for updates for those books? jQuery was extraordinarily popular and a real innovation -- probably more popular in relative terms than Angular is now. So time spent writing it probably matters. It probably makes sense to get the book out when the technology is on its upswing, which may only be a window of a few years. Especially with frameworks, less so for languages like Python or C. I think this is fundamental to the subject of programming. On the other hand, computer science is knowledge that lasts longer. I think it's justified to spend more time on a computer science book, but perhaps not a programming book. Of course many books are a mix of both. I have several old programming books, like "Programming Pearls", "The Awk Programming Language", Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. Although I have to say that I have no problem finding those books used, so I don't need to buy new copies.