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Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shel

Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality. I remember this sort of was true in the PHP documentation. The official documentation was always deeply flawed, but the comment thread attached to that documentation generally had the right info. But that was a precursor to our current situation. To get correct info you had to read a lot of conflicting info and synthesis it yourself. So I think we are seeing as good as the free ecosystem can get and what's sad is that we seem to have lost the paid ecosystem. It's not nearly as strong as it used to be. What people probably don't know about O'Reilly back in the day is what went into a book. The author was almost always a subject matter expert already. And their editor was also a subject matter expert. Then the book would go through tech review and those people were generally also pedantic luminaries. Then the book would be published and bugs would come into an errata tracking system. The vast majority of those bugs would get fixed between printings. And then, on top of all that, there was a tech support number. And if the code in the book wasn't working for you, then you could get a live person to try to work through it with you. That all costs a lot of money, but when you split the cost out across consumers it was only $30 or so per book. I value my time. And there are many, many places where I wish I could pay for quality. Tech content is one of them.

jjice 6y ago
Seems kind of like the video game crash of 1983[0]. A flood of low quality content that begins to drown out the high quality content. One of the best things about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. One of the worst parts about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. I'm a big fan of books because that is where a lot of experts seem to prefer to publish their knowledge, and it's usually worth the price. Of course that's not always the case, but I feel like I get much higher quality content from books than Medium articles. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
- brightball 6y ago
  I’m the same way. I prefer books because an expert had the opportunity to help you understand a subject from start to finish. Stack Overflow is great for quick reference to small questions.
  - rgblambda 6y ago
    Or edge cases that the book might not cover.
- azemetre 6y ago
  What are some high quality books you’d recommend that are somewhat recent (last ten years)? The only ones I can say, that I’ve also read, are YDKJS and Secrets JavaScript Ninja (work in web, but willing to read anything, good information is good information regardless of the tech).
  - jakub_g 6y ago
    High Performance Browser Networking - it's 2013 but apart from new tech and higher speeds, the basics of networking remain the same (also available online since a recently at https://hpbn.co/ https://hpbn.co/)
    - azemetre 6y ago
      This looks cool. I use to work at a national ISP and really miss the world of network engineering, granted browsers are one aspect of it but it's a very unique industry compared to e-comm and marketing tech. Thanks for the rec!
  - ProZsolt 6y ago
    Pro Git, Coders at Work both are ~10 years old. A recent one is Site Reliability Engineering published in 2016
    - afc 6y ago
jedberg 6y ago
> and those people were generally also pedantic luminaries Having been involved in publishing tech books, that is a beautiful way of describing tech reviewers. I too miss the paid ecosystem. And not just in tech books. Music too. Paying someone for curation had definite value to me.
- tonystubblebine 6y ago
  Yes. I meant it lovingly. The feedback I got on my own OReilly book was intense!
goatinaboat 6y ago
a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. I’ve never been so productive as I was in those days. Good quality documentation and no distractions. A golden age that we didn’t even know we were in. The modern development paradigm is a dumpster fire in comparison. Thanks for the good work you did back then producing those materials.
- 6510 6y ago
  In a perhaps futile attempt to solve the problem (contribute to solving it) I came to think of it like this: Web pages have the same kind of content as the first bunch of pages of a book. The entire internet is like that. You reach the largest audience by assuming the reader knows nothing. Eating nothing but appetizers turns out unsatisfying. It gets truly absurd where everyone seems to [further] optimize for delivering as little as possible.
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  Part of the reason for the higher productivity probably was the lower amount of churn in the development tools, frameworks, paradigms-du-jour, deployment strategies, microservices, picoservices and more. It doesn't make sense to produce and print books about technologies with a half-life time of a year nor does it seem to make sense to invest time and effort into learning them - but you'll have to anyway.
vbezhenar 6y ago
Books are awesome and somewhat under-appreciated piece of knowledge today. Many people prefer to lurk around blogs, documentation, tutorials for some technology, but I always trying to find a book from some reputable author. It does not always exist, but often it does exists and it's much better way to learn a technology. It might take a bit more time, because usually books present information in a more thorough way so you need to work from basics rather than copy-pasting some code and call it a day. But in the end it's worth time spent.
- rammy1234 6y ago
  I find very few books to be thorough. If you find books that contradicts itself, then the author doesn't know what he is talking about. A good reference point for a good book IMO
DeusExMachina 6y ago
I make a living selling iOS development courses at high prices, so I can tell you that the we didn't lose the paid ecosystem. I can't talk about book publishers like O'Really, and probably the market for books shrank. But I have several competitors that sell self published ebooks. The plethora of free content you find online is not always a good thing for everyone. As the author of the article says, most tech content is bullshit. Most people don't care, but there are plenty of people that realize that and are willing to pay.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  Paid tutorials, especially in video format, usually serve different clientele. There's often 'show me how it's done' instead of 'let me figure this out after reading it' mentality.
  - jagannathtech 6y ago
    If 'show me how it's done' is video then books are 'tell me how it's done'. The 'let me figure this out after reading it' would mostly be some docs.
- tonystubblebine 6y ago
  Do you have a link? I'd like to check them out.
  - DeusExMachina 6y ago
    My site is matteomanferdini.com
donmcronald 6y ago
I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high. I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was around $250 / year for the cheap option that let me "borrow" 10 books a month. The problem for me was that I'd typically buy 2-3 books per year ($100-$150) and I owned more than 10 books total, so the subscription seemed like a bad deal by comparison. The "unlimited" (with limited downloads IIRC) was $500+ / year. That's a lot of books. O'Reilly could have been the Spotify of tech books, but old school publishers were too scared to reassess their pricing. When the cost of distribution plummets, but results in a worse (ie: more expensive), product for your customers, it's not a shock to see those businesses struggle IMO, especially when the competition is free and "good enough".
- xfer 6y ago
  Also for selling digital goods regional pricing plays a big role in my opinion. Part of the reason why steam is so hugely successful.
- com2kid 6y ago
  The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it. If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a month pretty quickly. Every hour saved would pay for itself many times over. The problem is having a wide enough array of content that such a site becomes the single go to. O'Reilly had that catalog, but I think the tech world had gotten much more complicated since then.
  - inopinatus 6y ago
    Spotify’s returns to creators are pitifully small, and since they’re basically a distributor not a publisher, they don’t offer advances on royalties. So maybe the economics would disincentivize authorship.
cosmodisk 6y ago
A lot of that free content is not just wrong but also convoluted to extremes. I was reading about roles in Asp.net. After watching a few videos, reading a few articles, including the ones from Microsoft,I was none the wiser. Then I pulled out a book I bought a few years ago and it turns out it had a section on about roles.The guy explained the whole thing in just few pages and in a way that even a donkey would understand,while all those websites were showing some unnecessary complexity. I bought some technical books, including some classics and it's so refreshing compared to all that junk on Medium.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Perhaps part of the problem is that books are hard to search? It may well be a bad habit, but I frequently don't learn new technologies through a concerted effort. Instead, there's just something I want to do, and I google it, and after doing that a bunch I eventually learn a lot.
- logicprog 6y ago
  I feel like that method of discovery is how I learn best, because I learn WHY something is the way it is, and how it's actually used outside of toy examples. Plus, it's just how most people are built to learn. And yes, books not being searchable is basically THE reason I never use programming books.
  - gbjw 6y ago
    Hmm, perhaps, but I find that book indices can be better than a raw search of some term (easier to find more substantial entries).
    - logicprog 6y ago
      I've never found that to be true, but I'm just kind of bad at using books as references maybe. I always get extremely frustrated flipping through.
garyclarke27 6y ago
I really appreciate good books, I recently bought Javascript The Definitive Guide, for a second time 2020 edition (O’Reilly) it’s expensive £40 but worth every penny, 10 times more valuable than umpteen books at £10 to £20, so actually great value.
logicprog 6y ago
The problem with physical programming books - and don't get me wrong, I love physical books to a fault - is that they're easily made outdated, either with new versions of the same software, or the software gets replaced, or new best practices arise. Then you have to buy another version of the book. In addition to this, which basically makes physical programming books a nonstarter already, you have the issue that books aren't easily searchable or copy-pasteable. Really, there's not much of a reason to have physical programming books anymore; it's just not practical, whatever the level of quality you get elsewhere. And you seem to have left out official documentation and stuff, which is getting really good imo. The only reason for having a physical programming book is for totally timeless ideas, like algorithms and data structures textbooks, or introductory books to concepts like compilers.
- bagacrap 6y ago
  yea, in short, the internet enabled speeding up all of the extremely time consuming processes described by GP. You could have kept the steps the same on the O'Reilly books, but used the web for bug reports, pushing updates, etc. So what it comes down to is curated and paid content vs crowd sourced and free (ad supported). For me it comes down to scale. The chances I find precisely what I'm looking for on stack overflow is much higher than even the best curated content of all kind, just because SO is much bigger.
- amw-zero 6y ago
  There are a lot of “totally timeless” ideas, so lots of reasons to have paper books. There’s also nothing wrong with a book becoming outdated. A book is the most efficient way to transfer a large amount of information between two human minds. Just because some syntax changes doesn’t remove the value of that information being transferred in the first place. And just because a “best practice” changes, that doesn’t mean that understanding the old best practice has no value. In fact, everyone would benefit from understanding the history, context, and evolution of “best practices” (which change so often that they should really be called “current practices”). So, if you’re only looking at a book along one dimension which is “getting the most recent fashion status” in a fast-changing industry, then paper books aren’t appealing. But that’s the saddest dimension to evaluate a book on.
kumarvvr 6y ago
Good was hard. Nowadays anyone can publish a book on Amazon, digitally and get published. It's reflected a lot in their Kindle bookstore. Sometimes, having a good barrier to entry, brings out the best and the most dedicated.
lala26in 6y ago
These days O'Reilly books are shit.
kcorey 6y ago
I'd certainly pay for timely quality (I had at one time 4 packed bookshelves lining the walls of my office). The problem is that "timely" bit. A good book take 3-6 months to write, edit, review, and publish. In that time we could have as many releases with the info in the book radically out of date. Only solution is to go online, but that doesn't help the traditional write/edit/review cycle much. Things change so fast, I don't see much option to Stack Overflow... Not really.

jjice 6y ago

Seems kind of like the video game crash of 1983[0]. A flood of low quality content that begins to drown out the high quality content. One of the best things about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. One of the worst parts about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. I'm a big fan of books because that is where a lot of experts seem to prefer to publish their knowledge, and it's usually worth the price. Of course that's not always the case, but I feel like I get much higher quality content from books than Medium articles. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

brightball 6y ago
I’m the same way. I prefer books because an expert had the opportunity to help you understand a subject from start to finish. Stack Overflow is great for quick reference to small questions.
- rgblambda 6y ago
  Or edge cases that the book might not cover.
azemetre 6y ago
What are some high quality books you’d recommend that are somewhat recent (last ten years)? The only ones I can say, that I’ve also read, are YDKJS and Secrets JavaScript Ninja (work in web, but willing to read anything, good information is good information regardless of the tech).
- jakub_g 6y ago
  High Performance Browser Networking - it's 2013 but apart from new tech and higher speeds, the basics of networking remain the same (also available online since a recently at https://hpbn.co/ https://hpbn.co/)
  - azemetre 6y ago
    This looks cool. I use to work at a national ISP and really miss the world of network engineering, granted browsers are one aspect of it but it's a very unique industry compared to e-comm and marketing tech. Thanks for the rec!
- ProZsolt 6y ago
  Pro Git, Coders at Work both are ~10 years old. A recent one is Site Reliability Engineering published in 2016
  - afc 6y ago

jedberg 6y ago

> and those people were generally also pedantic luminaries Having been involved in publishing tech books, that is a beautiful way of describing tech reviewers. I too miss the paid ecosystem. And not just in tech books. Music too. Paying someone for curation had definite value to me.

tonystubblebine 6y ago
Yes. I meant it lovingly. The feedback I got on my own OReilly book was intense!

goatinaboat 6y ago

a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. I’ve never been so productive as I was in those days. Good quality documentation and no distractions. A golden age that we didn’t even know we were in. The modern development paradigm is a dumpster fire in comparison. Thanks for the good work you did back then producing those materials.

6510 6y ago
In a perhaps futile attempt to solve the problem (contribute to solving it) I came to think of it like this: Web pages have the same kind of content as the first bunch of pages of a book. The entire internet is like that. You reach the largest audience by assuming the reader knows nothing. Eating nothing but appetizers turns out unsatisfying. It gets truly absurd where everyone seems to [further] optimize for delivering as little as possible.
Yetanfou 6y ago
Part of the reason for the higher productivity probably was the lower amount of churn in the development tools, frameworks, paradigms-du-jour, deployment strategies, microservices, picoservices and more. It doesn't make sense to produce and print books about technologies with a half-life time of a year nor does it seem to make sense to invest time and effort into learning them - but you'll have to anyway.

vbezhenar 6y ago

Books are awesome and somewhat under-appreciated piece of knowledge today. Many people prefer to lurk around blogs, documentation, tutorials for some technology, but I always trying to find a book from some reputable author. It does not always exist, but often it does exists and it's much better way to learn a technology. It might take a bit more time, because usually books present information in a more thorough way so you need to work from basics rather than copy-pasting some code and call it a day. But in the end it's worth time spent.

rammy1234 6y ago
I find very few books to be thorough. If you find books that contradicts itself, then the author doesn't know what he is talking about. A good reference point for a good book IMO

DeusExMachina 6y ago

I make a living selling iOS development courses at high prices, so I can tell you that the we didn't lose the paid ecosystem. I can't talk about book publishers like O'Really, and probably the market for books shrank. But I have several competitors that sell self published ebooks. The plethora of free content you find online is not always a good thing for everyone. As the author of the article says, most tech content is bullshit. Most people don't care, but there are plenty of people that realize that and are willing to pay.

cosmodisk 6y ago
Paid tutorials, especially in video format, usually serve different clientele. There's often 'show me how it's done' instead of 'let me figure this out after reading it' mentality.
- jagannathtech 6y ago
  If 'show me how it's done' is video then books are 'tell me how it's done'. The 'let me figure this out after reading it' would mostly be some docs.
tonystubblebine 6y ago
Do you have a link? I'd like to check them out.
- DeusExMachina 6y ago
  My site is matteomanferdini.com

donmcronald 6y ago

I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high. I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was around $250 / year for the cheap option that let me "borrow" 10 books a month. The problem for me was that I'd typically buy 2-3 books per year ($100-$150) and I owned more than 10 books total, so the subscription seemed like a bad deal by comparison. The "unlimited" (with limited downloads IIRC) was $500+ / year. That's a lot of books. O'Reilly could have been the Spotify of tech books, but old school publishers were too scared to reassess their pricing. When the cost of distribution plummets, but results in a worse (ie: more expensive), product for your customers, it's not a shock to see those businesses struggle IMO, especially when the competition is free and "good enough".

xfer 6y ago
Also for selling digital goods regional pricing plays a big role in my opinion. Part of the reason why steam is so hugely successful.
com2kid 6y ago
The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it. If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a month pretty quickly. Every hour saved would pay for itself many times over. The problem is having a wide enough array of content that such a site becomes the single go to. O'Reilly had that catalog, but I think the tech world had gotten much more complicated since then.
- inopinatus 6y ago
  Spotify’s returns to creators are pitifully small, and since they’re basically a distributor not a publisher, they don’t offer advances on royalties. So maybe the economics would disincentivize authorship.

cosmodisk 6y ago

A lot of that free content is not just wrong but also convoluted to extremes. I was reading about roles in Asp.net. After watching a few videos, reading a few articles, including the ones from Microsoft,I was none the wiser. Then I pulled out a book I bought a few years ago and it turns out it had a section on about roles.The guy explained the whole thing in just few pages and in a way that even a donkey would understand,while all those websites were showing some unnecessary complexity. I bought some technical books, including some classics and it's so refreshing compared to all that junk on Medium.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Perhaps part of the problem is that books are hard to search? It may well be a bad habit, but I frequently don't learn new technologies through a concerted effort. Instead, there's just something I want to do, and I google it, and after doing that a bunch I eventually learn a lot.

logicprog 6y ago
I feel like that method of discovery is how I learn best, because I learn WHY something is the way it is, and how it's actually used outside of toy examples. Plus, it's just how most people are built to learn. And yes, books not being searchable is basically THE reason I never use programming books.
- gbjw 6y ago
  Hmm, perhaps, but I find that book indices can be better than a raw search of some term (easier to find more substantial entries).
  - logicprog 6y ago
    I've never found that to be true, but I'm just kind of bad at using books as references maybe. I always get extremely frustrated flipping through.

garyclarke27 6y ago

I really appreciate good books, I recently bought Javascript The Definitive Guide, for a second time 2020 edition (O’Reilly) it’s expensive £40 but worth every penny, 10 times more valuable than umpteen books at £10 to £20, so actually great value.

logicprog 6y ago

The problem with physical programming books - and don't get me wrong, I love physical books to a fault - is that they're easily made outdated, either with new versions of the same software, or the software gets replaced, or new best practices arise. Then you have to buy another version of the book. In addition to this, which basically makes physical programming books a nonstarter already, you have the issue that books aren't easily searchable or copy-pasteable. Really, there's not much of a reason to have physical programming books anymore; it's just not practical, whatever the level of quality you get elsewhere. And you seem to have left out official documentation and stuff, which is getting really good imo. The only reason for having a physical programming book is for totally timeless ideas, like algorithms and data structures textbooks, or introductory books to concepts like compilers.

bagacrap 6y ago
yea, in short, the internet enabled speeding up all of the extremely time consuming processes described by GP. You could have kept the steps the same on the O'Reilly books, but used the web for bug reports, pushing updates, etc. So what it comes down to is curated and paid content vs crowd sourced and free (ad supported). For me it comes down to scale. The chances I find precisely what I'm looking for on stack overflow is much higher than even the best curated content of all kind, just because SO is much bigger.
amw-zero 6y ago
There are a lot of “totally timeless” ideas, so lots of reasons to have paper books. There’s also nothing wrong with a book becoming outdated. A book is the most efficient way to transfer a large amount of information between two human minds. Just because some syntax changes doesn’t remove the value of that information being transferred in the first place. And just because a “best practice” changes, that doesn’t mean that understanding the old best practice has no value. In fact, everyone would benefit from understanding the history, context, and evolution of “best practices” (which change so often that they should really be called “current practices”). So, if you’re only looking at a book along one dimension which is “getting the most recent fashion status” in a fast-changing industry, then paper books aren’t appealing. But that’s the saddest dimension to evaluate a book on.

kumarvvr 6y ago

Good was hard. Nowadays anyone can publish a book on Amazon, digitally and get published. It's reflected a lot in their Kindle bookstore. Sometimes, having a good barrier to entry, brings out the best and the most dedicated.

lala26in 6y ago

These days O'Reilly books are shit.

kcorey 6y ago

I'd certainly pay for timely quality (I had at one time 4 packed bookshelves lining the walls of my office). The problem is that "timely" bit. A good book take 3-6 months to write, edit, review, and publish. In that time we could have as many releases with the info in the book radically out of date. Only solution is to go online, but that doesn't help the traditional write/edit/review cycle much. Things change so fast, I don't see much option to Stack Overflow... Not really.