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> The biggest thing with the older ones is the lack of assumption of Internet, so the book will refer to itself instead of referring to online/other documentati
by Qem 3y ago
> The biggest thing with the older ones is the lack of assumption of Internet, so the book will refer to itself instead of referring to online/other documentation.
I also miss this aspect of old books. They were more self-contained.
- bombcar 3y agoI feel I can get a quite detailed understanding of DOS, Windows 3.11, even Windows 95 from printed books and reference materials of the time. But I feel much of the documentation/reference around things from 2010 is both late enough that it wasn't printed, and old enough that what was online has failed or faded away.
- asciimov 3y agoIt helps that stable versions lasted a lot longer back then, and things moved around a lot less. Nowadays if you need to change a setting, you not only have to contend with major version but what biannual revision of windows you are using, and hope that someone at Microsoft hasn't decided to move that option in an update.
- commandlinefan 3y agoEven the documentation that is still around is disorganized and useless. I want a linear path I can follow to learn something, not some random collection of hyperlinks to more information.
- tzs 3y agoAnother great thing about books is that they have a built in order to them. Start at page 1 and read the pages in order until the end. You can skip around, and they provide some aid for that via the table of contents and the index and references in the text to other parts of the text, but they (usually) are designed so that if you just start at the beginning and read through to the end you get everything the book has to offer in an order that makes sense. Compare to far too much online documentation. This is what I've frequently run into. I want to learn about some particular subject, so I find a site that has an introduction or tutorial on that. The document is even book-like in the sense that it is organized as pages, and at the bottom of each page there are "next" and "previous" links. But there is a sidebar on each page, with lists of related material and some of that sounds like material I'm going to need to know at some point. But there is no indication if it is material that I'm going to come across later if I just keep following the "next" links or it is something beyond the scope of the current document that I'll need to bookmark now to come back to later.
- commandlinefan 3y ago> and read the pages in order until the end And if you put it down and pick it back up tomorrow, it will still be where you left off.