4 ms·

> > >if someone actually reads the manual > Uh, I thought everyone does. ... have ... have you ever met another programmer?

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
The old ones did this. Want to learn C? Read K&R. Want to learn Perl? Read the Camel book. Want to learn C++? Read Stroustrup. That was the way we learned. These days? Not so much. Stroustrup is now big enough to use in self-defense. I'm not sure there ever was an equivalent book for Java. (There is one for Go, however.) React? Angular? TypeScript? Do they have authoritative books? If they do, is that the canonical way to learn them? I think something changed 20 years ago. The book used to be the way to learn, and now it's not. I don't know if the programmers changed, or if the languages changed, or if the books changed, but something did.
- JeremyBanks 8y ago
  FWIW Rust has "The Rust Book" as their primary long-form documentation, separate from their reference documentation. It's a common starting point for people new to the language. I read it in chunks as I was getting started. I'm not sure how it compares to those works of the past (perhaps less detailed?), but I found it much more approachable than most languages' documentation and more in-depth than most languages' tutorials. The old ways may not be entirely lost.
  - steveklabnik 8y ago
    All three of the books your parent mentions were explicit influences on TRPL. So yes, it lives on :)
yesenadam 8y ago
Haha... well, in person, probably not. I've been programming since the 80s, and most of the 'voices' I've heard have been writers on programming, besides more recently online on here, SE etc. Not programming professionally, just doing whatever I wanted. I got a copy of Stroustrup 20 years ago, but never read most of it. Have a few other massive C++ books, and a few smaller ones, that I consulted constantly though. Recently I got into LaTeX, read almost every book on LaTeX + TeX available (a couple of dozen), all very good. Got into Prolog, (about a dozen books), all very good... All the books on AWK are great. Same with Lisp. Sure, Stack Exchange is a wonderful resource, hard to imagine doing without it. It's like having a teacher - read the books, then consult the teacher for questions that you can't immediately find answers for in the book. Some things are done better online: bash has a few great websites, and w3schools is great for css/js/html.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

The old ones did this. Want to learn C? Read K&R. Want to learn Perl? Read the Camel book. Want to learn C++? Read Stroustrup. That was the way we learned. These days? Not so much. Stroustrup is now big enough to use in self-defense. I'm not sure there ever was an equivalent book for Java. (There is one for Go, however.) React? Angular? TypeScript? Do they have authoritative books? If they do, is that the canonical way to learn them? I think something changed 20 years ago. The book used to be the way to learn, and now it's not. I don't know if the programmers changed, or if the languages changed, or if the books changed, but something did.

JeremyBanks 8y ago
FWIW Rust has "The Rust Book" as their primary long-form documentation, separate from their reference documentation. It's a common starting point for people new to the language. I read it in chunks as I was getting started. I'm not sure how it compares to those works of the past (perhaps less detailed?), but I found it much more approachable than most languages' documentation and more in-depth than most languages' tutorials. The old ways may not be entirely lost.
- steveklabnik 8y ago
  All three of the books your parent mentions were explicit influences on TRPL. So yes, it lives on :)

yesenadam 8y ago

Haha... well, in person, probably not. I've been programming since the 80s, and most of the 'voices' I've heard have been writers on programming, besides more recently online on here, SE etc. Not programming professionally, just doing whatever I wanted. I got a copy of Stroustrup 20 years ago, but never read most of it. Have a few other massive C++ books, and a few smaller ones, that I consulted constantly though. Recently I got into LaTeX, read almost every book on LaTeX + TeX available (a couple of dozen), all very good. Got into Prolog, (about a dozen books), all very good... All the books on AWK are great. Same with Lisp. Sure, Stack Exchange is a wonderful resource, hard to imagine doing without it. It's like having a teacher - read the books, then consult the teacher for questions that you can't immediately find answers for in the book. Some things are done better online: bash has a few great websites, and w3schools is great for css/js/html.