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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physical programming books - and don't get me wrong, I love physical books to a fault - is that they're easily made outdated, either with new v

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physical programming books - and don't get me wrong, I love physical books to a fault - is that they're easily made outdated, either with new versions of the same software, or the software gets replaced, or new best practices arise.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 There’s also nothing wrong with a book becoming outdated.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.

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.