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I had a couple of thousand books in my flat in london, including about 500 technical computing ones (design, languages, other stuff). I got my nephew to fix up
by zabzonk 9mo ago
I had a couple of thousand books in my flat in london, including about 500 technical computing ones (design, languages, other stuff). I got my nephew to fix up the flat, for sale. He asked me "Which of these books do you want to keep?", my response after a few seconds "None".
It's so easy to hang on to things you really don't need.
- criddell 9mo agoYou're not afraid you're going to need that UCSD Pascal book from 1986?
- bluGill 9mo agoMy physics textbooks look impressive sitting on a bookself even if I never open them again. I only need a few books like that to prove I'm smart though. "I swear someday I will open my calculus textbook again and do all the exercises..."
- criddell 9mo agoIt's fun to find a colleague's collection of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming Books books and open them to hear the crack of a book that's never been opened before.
- throwway120385 9mo agoWe buy them to pay homage to Knuth more than to work through the exercises.
- klatchex_too 9mo agoThat's why if you're a poser like me, you buy them used in poor shape.
- B1FIDO 9mo agoOf course you do! Any student who has read/seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince knows: the most dog-eared, worn-out, scribbled-up textbook is the best textbook you could hope for!
- c22 9mo agoI like when there's stuff underlined and scribbled in the margins. You get to see exactly how far the last user got--often just a chapter or two.
- ghaff 9mo agoI've gotten rid of a bunch of books. Don't care a lot so long as they now fit my bookshelves. But will probably dump another bag or two to my library's next book sale next fall.
- ThrowawayR2 9mo agoOof, that's hitting below the belt, man ....
- davidwritesbugs 9mo agoThat's particularly true of tech books. I want to hang on to my copy of "Tinker Tailor" but "Adobe Air in Action" 2008?
- zabzonk 9mo agoYeah, well, I do kind of miss "The Design & Evolution of C++", but I can't convince myself I actually need it.
- biofox 9mo agoThat's a sad indictment of tech. Most underlying technology is timeless (see TAOCP, SICP, CLRS, K&R, GoF, Dragon Book, Beej's Guide, Sipser,...); but we seem set on producing an endless, pointless, churn of frameworks and minor language differences in the name of progress.
- zabzonk 9mo ago> Most underlying technology is timeless (see TAOCP, SICP, CLRS, K&R, GoF, Dragon Book, True enuf, but how often do you actually refer to the books underlying ideas? I've had (now gone, presumably) TAOCP on my bookshelves for years, but how often did I use it? Stuff on RNG a bit, I guess...
- fud101 9mo agoTAOCP is trash. I wish I grew up in the era where you could just hit up zlib for an accessible book on any topic instead of highly rated and hardly read 'classics' like TAOCP.
- jz391 9mo agoTrue for many, but I actually have been acquiring some computing books I had enjoyed reading in my youth (e.g. Organick's Multics). Perhaps living permanently abroad strengthens nostalgia...
- julesallen 9mo agoThere’s need and there’s want I suppose. My oldest computer book I won’t part with is Alan Simpson’s dBase III+ Programmer's reference guide, circa 1987. This book was transformative and allowed me to get a gig as a coder, so much self driven practice on a crappy underpowered generic clone PC. That crappy hardware was an advantage I didn’t see at the time, having to think about routines that were fast enough based not because of faster disks and tons of RAM. Do I need this book? Not so much. But it brings me joy carefully flipping through it on occasion.
- esafak 9mo agoThat does not mean they were all useless, of course; maybe you have absorbed some of them.