Tasks specific books age very quickly, and are easily replaced by googling. Books about learning programming for beginners or just about a language have a long

Tasks specific books age very quickly, and are easily replaced by googling. Books about learning programming for beginners or just about a language have a longer shelf life. Some people like to work through them chapter by chapter as a course, and they can be particularly useful to kids in smartphone only houses who don't have day to day access to a PC. There are, as others mentioned, lots of "theory" books that are ageless. How To Solve It: Modern Heuristics for example. But these are most useful to professionals and university students honestly. There are also pop-science type books like Algorithms To Live By or Invisible Women that are interesting to a wider audience but don't directly teach skills. The problem with throwing all the task specific books in the trash is that they do provide some kind of a bridge between the very basics and actually doing something useful. Users don't want to learn python, they want to Automate The Boring Stuff or do machine learning or whatever. I think pointing them at the latest ebooks for that stuff might be best. If my local library let me e-borrow the latest packtpub and oriely books that would be awesome. One thing I find wierd as I get into harder, more architectural problems, is that as an industry we spent decades thinking about stuff, creating standards, and writing books about stuff, and no one reads them. We prefer to invent wheels again because it feels more like progress than reading books.