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There are three kinds of tech books in my mind - Reference, Tutorial, and Fundamentals. I can sort of understand wanting paper reference books, since it can be

There are three kinds of tech books in my mind - Reference, Tutorial, and Fundamentals. I can sort of understand wanting paper reference books, since it can be nicer to just flip around instead of googling, but it seems silly to complain about recency, since that's the _obvious_ tradeoff in getting a paper book instead of just googling for the wc3schools page on the <section> tag. Tutorial books are a tougher one, because it's really hard to nail the audience. Is it really for beginner beginners who don't even know syntax, or just for programmers who are new to the language? Dummies books are for one group, the pickaxe ruby book is for another. I do feel like Oreilly has been nailing this recently, releasing a number of small but info-heavy tutorial books on things like stats and machine learning, while also pushing out their bread & butter 800 page language/MS Office books, and the Head First series for people new to the programming world. With new versions of CRLS and Knuth in the past year or two, the fundamentals world is doing ok, although since they're primarily textbooks it may be a while before we see them in ebook format =(.

bergie 15y ago
The Fundamentals category seems to be the only one really making sense. These are more about why than how, and age generally much better. Blog posts appear as ideal, with easy copy-and-paste of code, updateability and linking to more in-depth references and other tutorials. I wonder if something like the pull requests of GitHub could be meshed with a literate programming tool (for easy extraction of source code from document) to produce the ultimate, sustainable tutorial infrastructure
swalberg 15y ago
The tutorial type technical books are very successful with people going after vendor certifications. In this case the audience has a fair degree of technical knowledge but is looking for a path through a particular aspect of the domain. With the main vendors like Cisco and Microsoft, I don't know many people that don't get the book even if they are doing the bulk of their studying with online resources. There is a big difference between the good and the bad in this realm. A good book is worth keeping even after you've passed the exam.
jowiar 15y ago
Other way around - I can see zero point in paper reference books. Having all my reference books sitting on my hard drive and using Spotlight works far better than actually grabbing the right book and finding the right page. E-book has far less advantage over paper when the material is being consumed sequentially.
- adestefan 15y ago
  I get more out of paper reference books than electronic reference materials. When I need a reference book it's usually because I can't remember something exactly, but do know the idea I'm trying to find. For me, it's much easier to skim through a paper reference manual, than to try to do the same in electronic documentation.

bergie 15y ago

The Fundamentals category seems to be the only one really making sense. These are more about why than how, and age generally much better. Blog posts appear as ideal, with easy copy-and-paste of code, updateability and linking to more in-depth references and other tutorials. I wonder if something like the pull requests of GitHub could be meshed with a literate programming tool (for easy extraction of source code from document) to produce the ultimate, sustainable tutorial infrastructure

swalberg 15y ago

The tutorial type technical books are very successful with people going after vendor certifications. In this case the audience has a fair degree of technical knowledge but is looking for a path through a particular aspect of the domain. With the main vendors like Cisco and Microsoft, I don't know many people that don't get the book even if they are doing the bulk of their studying with online resources. There is a big difference between the good and the bad in this realm. A good book is worth keeping even after you've passed the exam.

jowiar 15y ago

Other way around - I can see zero point in paper reference books. Having all my reference books sitting on my hard drive and using Spotlight works far better than actually grabbing the right book and finding the right page. E-book has far less advantage over paper when the material is being consumed sequentially.

adestefan 15y ago
I get more out of paper reference books than electronic reference materials. When I need a reference book it's usually because I can't remember something exactly, but do know the idea I'm trying to find. For me, it's much easier to skim through a paper reference manual, than to try to do the same in electronic documentation.