4 ms·

I’ve asked pre-internet programmers and they said they used to keep reference books at their desk or even a small library/book room at their employers. I’ve he

by wil421 7y ago

I’ve asked pre-internet programmers and they said they used to keep reference books at their desk or even a small library/book room at their employers. I’ve heard some government contractors can’t google because they work on non-internet connected computers. They probably keep a lot of books.

RHSeeger 7y ago
That's what I did at the time. I only got rid of my series of Java 2, Motif, Xlib/Xt, etc programming books when I moved a few years back.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  But what if you need them again?
InitialLastName 7y ago
A friend works at a military contractor doing (effectively) windows GUIs for power system controls. His only access to an internet-connected computer is on his breaks, where he has to wait in line to use one of a very small number of computers in a special room to google things. I don't think he has books, but he has an enormous amount of documentation (something like the whole MSDN library, a bunch of internal documentation and reference info, and other documentation) installed on his computer.
- dharmab 7y ago
  I hope they can get a StackOverflow offline archive https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
jamil7 7y ago
I worked for a few months without an internet connection, I'd go to public wifi spots and load up on all the documentation and packages I needed. I wouldn't recommend it but it definitely teaches you to be resourceful.
zrobotics 7y ago
Reminds me of the days of paper datasheets for electronics. God am I glad I missed out on that.
walshemj 7y ago
I have a friend who used to work for the defence civil service and one time he was out in the desert in the USA with no proper internet connection just email - he emailed his techie friends to ask how you did some arcane vbscript stuff as we could look it up.
mikekchar 7y ago
I've never worked pre-internet. In fact, I've had internet access in all of my jobs, but I've definitely worked pre-"internet was a useful source for searching for answers to programming questions". I mean, we had Usenet, and you could ask a question, but we didn't have search engines that were useful in that capacity. I definitely had a lot of books, but actually the vast majority of my information came from man pages, RFCs and specs. I actually learned C++ by reading the spec -- I've never read any C++ book in my life, even though I was a professional C++ programmer for at least 10 years. For learning the STL, I did it by reading the source code! Probably the biggest thing I miss in the age of Google is that offline documentation is getting hard to find. One of the reasons I chose Rust for my latest side project is that it's extremely easy to install offline information for virtually everything. I like doing web searches searches and Stack Overflow is really stupendously awesome. Especially when I'm working in a new language or framework, I can find idiomatic solutions to problems without having to read through thousands of lines of source code. However, I do think that newer programmers today are missing out when they don't learn how to search primary sources to get their answers. If you have a question about how the language works, it really does pay off to look at the spec. In doing so, you learn about things in a larger context. I'm always grateful for SO answers that have links to primary sources like specs in their answers, but I've noticed that my younger colleagues almost never click on those links. When they have the answer they want, they are back to their own code. Often they miss important nuances because they are too focused on getting the answer. Similarly, I have found that there is often a huge reluctance to read source code. A colleague once joked that he used dependencies so that he didn't have to read the source code. It's funny because it's true ;-) However, if you at least try to answer your questions first by looking at the source code for a dependency, then it will tell you a lot about that dependency (mostly: OMG! We need to ditch this ASAP! ;-) ) I used to have a collection of hundreds of RFCs on my computer. Really, anything that is about the internet has an RFC (or did back in the day, anyway). These days, even I'm lazy and don't bother to maintain offline collections of this information. However, it is worrying that I often run into developers who build very complex internet applications and don't even know what an RFC is let alone use them to learn how they should build their systems. They will have very ingrained opinions on how build things, but they have no idea how the HTTP protocol works, for example. Discussions on the topic of how to design something usually results in snippets of blog posts obtained through Google searches, rather than pointing to the relevant RFC and saying, "It works like X so we need to do Y". Negotiation of how to proceed often involves considerable heated discussion about which notable internet pundit we should trust the most. Yeah, this is an "old programmer rant" ;-) However, if I could wave a magic wand and get younger programmers to all add something to their arsenal of tricks it would be to read primary sources early and often.
organsnyder 7y ago
The first programming language I learned was BASIC, using the (quite obscure) Z-BASIC environment. I put a lot of wear on the reference manual, and had many page numbers memorized.
brandonmenc 7y ago
Starting around 8th grade, I would walk to the recently opened Barnes and Noble with a pen and notepad and hand copy material from programming books I couldn't afford, then walk back home and try the stuff out in Turbo C. Rinse, repeat. Fun times.
perl4ever 7y ago
I haven't looked anything up in a book on programming in a long time, but I'm not really a software engineer presently. While I rely on Google in general and stack overflow in particular, I don't believe everything is on the Internet. I went through a period where I started to think everything was, but in recent years I realized it isn't. And just making the decision to type things into Google is far from the ability to search effectively. Increasingly search engines will converge on a bad answer for a given question because it's the most popular. You just cannot assume that the correct solution is going to be prominent, because once another one has critical mass, it cannot be dethroned. The result that sounds just barely plausible enough to fool the average person making the search (not the average programmer) wins, and often it's terribly wrong.

by wil421 7y ago

RHSeeger 7y ago

That's what I did at the time. I only got rid of my series of Java 2, Motif, Xlib/Xt, etc programming books when I moved a few years back.

jplayer01 7y ago
But what if you need them again?

InitialLastName 7y ago

A friend works at a military contractor doing (effectively) windows GUIs for power system controls. His only access to an internet-connected computer is on his breaks, where he has to wait in line to use one of a very small number of computers in a special room to google things. I don't think he has books, but he has an enormous amount of documentation (something like the whole MSDN library, a bunch of internal documentation and reference info, and other documentation) installed on his computer.

dharmab 7y ago
I hope they can get a StackOverflow offline archive https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

jamil7 7y ago

I worked for a few months without an internet connection, I'd go to public wifi spots and load up on all the documentation and packages I needed. I wouldn't recommend it but it definitely teaches you to be resourceful.

zrobotics 7y ago

Reminds me of the days of paper datasheets for electronics. God am I glad I missed out on that.

walshemj 7y ago

I have a friend who used to work for the defence civil service and one time he was out in the desert in the USA with no proper internet connection just email - he emailed his techie friends to ask how you did some arcane vbscript stuff as we could look it up.

mikekchar 7y ago

I've never worked pre-internet. In fact, I've had internet access in all of my jobs, but I've definitely worked pre-"internet was a useful source for searching for answers to programming questions". I mean, we had Usenet, and you could ask a question, but we didn't have search engines that were useful in that capacity. I definitely had a lot of books, but actually the vast majority of my information came from man pages, RFCs and specs. I actually learned C++ by reading the spec -- I've never read any C++ book in my life, even though I was a professional C++ programmer for at least 10 years. For learning the STL, I did it by reading the source code! Probably the biggest thing I miss in the age of Google is that offline documentation is getting hard to find. One of the reasons I chose Rust for my latest side project is that it's extremely easy to install offline information for virtually everything. I like doing web searches searches and Stack Overflow is really stupendously awesome. Especially when I'm working in a new language or framework, I can find idiomatic solutions to problems without having to read through thousands of lines of source code. However, I do think that newer programmers today are missing out when they don't learn how to search primary sources to get their answers. If you have a question about how the language works, it really does pay off to look at the spec. In doing so, you learn about things in a larger context. I'm always grateful for SO answers that have links to primary sources like specs in their answers, but I've noticed that my younger colleagues almost never click on those links. When they have the answer they want, they are back to their own code. Often they miss important nuances because they are too focused on getting the answer. Similarly, I have found that there is often a huge reluctance to read source code. A colleague once joked that he used dependencies so that he didn't have to read the source code. It's funny because it's true ;-) However, if you at least try to answer your questions first by looking at the source code for a dependency, then it will tell you a lot about that dependency (mostly: OMG! We need to ditch this ASAP! ;-) ) I used to have a collection of hundreds of RFCs on my computer. Really, anything that is about the internet has an RFC (or did back in the day, anyway). These days, even I'm lazy and don't bother to maintain offline collections of this information. However, it is worrying that I often run into developers who build very complex internet applications and don't even know what an RFC is let alone use them to learn how they should build their systems. They will have very ingrained opinions on how build things, but they have no idea how the HTTP protocol works, for example. Discussions on the topic of how to design something usually results in snippets of blog posts obtained through Google searches, rather than pointing to the relevant RFC and saying, "It works like X so we need to do Y". Negotiation of how to proceed often involves considerable heated discussion about which notable internet pundit we should trust the most. Yeah, this is an "old programmer rant" ;-) However, if I could wave a magic wand and get younger programmers to all add something to their arsenal of tricks it would be to read primary sources early and often.

organsnyder 7y ago

The first programming language I learned was BASIC, using the (quite obscure) Z-BASIC environment. I put a lot of wear on the reference manual, and had many page numbers memorized.

brandonmenc 7y ago

Starting around 8th grade, I would walk to the recently opened Barnes and Noble with a pen and notepad and hand copy material from programming books I couldn't afford, then walk back home and try the stuff out in Turbo C. Rinse, repeat. Fun times.

perl4ever 7y ago

I haven't looked anything up in a book on programming in a long time, but I'm not really a software engineer presently. While I rely on Google in general and stack overflow in particular, I don't believe everything is on the Internet. I went through a period where I started to think everything was, but in recent years I realized it isn't. And just making the decision to type things into Google is far from the ability to search effectively. Increasingly search engines will converge on a bad answer for a given question because it's the most popular. You just cannot assume that the correct solution is going to be prominent, because once another one has critical mass, it cannot be dethroned. The result that sounds just barely plausible enough to fool the average person making the search (not the average programmer) wins, and often it's terribly wrong.