The guide would have been extremely relevant in the days before Stack Overflow and useful search came around along with the rest of the web friendly internet -

The guide would have been extremely relevant in the days before Stack Overflow and useful search came around along with the rest of the web friendly internet - the lack of date on the article makes me question when it was originally written, in those days one had to pray someone posted the same question on Usenet or else one would have to go on a road trip to a book store, do an extensive real life document search, then failing that, hope that the technical book store might have something to address the issue or, failing that, copious back issues of IEEE periodicals/Dr Dobbs/etc at the college library (or the ones one had in personally library first).