3 ms·

Whilst your core point about books aging is absolutely true I think thats mostly the mass market publications designed to ease entry than actual papers. Simila

Whilst your core point about books aging is absolutely true I think thats mostly the mass market publications designed to ease entry than actual papers. Similarly, anything writen about an implementation is short lived. The Idiots Guide to Windows 98 is less useful today than it was in 1998 and is getting less useful with time. Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, McCarthy et al are still seminal. But these are academic papers that focus on what is possible to compute and how one might construct an implementation. There are some interesting edge cases too. Is the Gang of Four Design Patterns still relevent? Its not embarassing, but its not as applicable as it used to be.

throwawaybbqed 8y ago
As an aside, what would be today's ideal intro to design patterns? Now .. on topic ... I had a roomful of books collected from my youth. I cleaned out my room at my parents house some years ago ... and pretty much everything got chucked. The only books that I kept were seminal books like Knuth, Cormen, Gang of Four, TCP/IP series (v6 kinda makes them out-of-date too). All my MFC books ... java books .. pretty much all of it was out of date. I had an epiphany .. CS does not age well at all. I no longer buy physical books ... I got a subscription to Safari and love it. Also consume tons of content on e-learning platforms. But .. I really miss real books.
- tsmarsh 8y ago
  I miss walking in a room of books. My parents had bookshelves that filled walls that I built with my Dad before they moved. I, and most other people that visited the house, would spend a fair amount of time just looking at the books on the shelf. Comparing notes on what they'd read, and asking to borrow books. Looking at the books, and being reminded of the experience you had with them or wanted to have with them was a vitally important part of the process that I fear we've lost.

throwawaybbqed 8y ago

As an aside, what would be today's ideal intro to design patterns? Now .. on topic ... I had a roomful of books collected from my youth. I cleaned out my room at my parents house some years ago ... and pretty much everything got chucked. The only books that I kept were seminal books like Knuth, Cormen, Gang of Four, TCP/IP series (v6 kinda makes them out-of-date too). All my MFC books ... java books .. pretty much all of it was out of date. I had an epiphany .. CS does not age well at all. I no longer buy physical books ... I got a subscription to Safari and love it. Also consume tons of content on e-learning platforms. But .. I really miss real books.

tsmarsh 8y ago
I miss walking in a room of books. My parents had bookshelves that filled walls that I built with my Dad before they moved. I, and most other people that visited the house, would spend a fair amount of time just looking at the books on the shelf. Comparing notes on what they'd read, and asking to borrow books. Looking at the books, and being reminded of the experience you had with them or wanted to have with them was a vitally important part of the process that I fear we've lost.