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Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
- arikrahman 5mo agoThe most transformative book for me has been SICP and Uncle Bob's work.
- CharlieDigital 5mo agoIt's a shame because to guide a coding agent, you need to have the right grammar and vocabulary to describe what you want and how you want it to be built. Junior devs should read not because they need to know how to write the code, but they need to know the vocabulary and the grammar to guide the agents.
- natebc 5mo agoJunior devs should still read to learn how to write the code. Surely the desired state isn't that nobody knows how to write code any more right?
- eclipxe 5mo agoDo you know how to operate a punch card?
- natebc 5mo agoYes. But Python isn't punch cards behind the scenes so it's not the same thing at all. Besides. You're not asking <AGENT OF THE WEEK> to produce punch cards to jam into the PDP.
- Scoundreller 5mo agosomeone needs to try this
- jhide 5mo agoDo you maintain a system in which punch cards play a critical role?
- ares623 5mo agoDo you let your Jenkins re-inference your entire program from markdown files on each push?
- throwaway613746 5mo ago[dead]
- eric__cartman 5mo agoIf I transported you to the 1960s and gave you a wizard that could punch cards for you with a chance of making a mistake, would you still bother to learn how to operate a punch card? What would you do if the wizard gets stuck? Coarse the wizard into making the black box work through somebody else's direct perspective on the problem?
- throwaway613746 5mo ago[dead]
- merlincorey 5mo agoYes, and IBM has current documentation if you need to that has been updated in 2026: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.2.0?topic=considerations-using-card-reader-punch https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.2.0?topic=considerations-u... It's generally and simply an encoding of what amounts to binary machine code which you translate via assembly code acting as a deterministic compiler from assembly to machine code if you are doing it manually. LLMs aren't a deterministic process and human languages aren't as clear as machine code and assembly.
- fghorow 5mo agoO.M.G. I last used a card punch in circa 1980 or thereabouts...
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- CharlieDigital 5mo agoI don't think this is comparable. It's more like a restaurant. You give an order and a little while later, a finished dish appears. The difference between a Chipotle and a Michelin starred establishment is that Chipotle is just assembling a mass produced good. A Michelin chef knows their ingredients inside and out; knows the science of how those ingredients work; knows varied techniques to extract flavors, create textures, etc. Anyone can work in a Chipotle; few can achieve a Michelin star.
- wpollock 5mo ago> Do you know how to operate a punch card? I remember! You created a control card, with tab stops and other controls, wrapped it around a control drum, and then had an easy time punching your source FORTRAN! I just looked and found my old control drum, in the back of my junk drawer. But I can't find an old punch card machine in there, most have lost it somehow.
- mook 5mo agoI've never programmed before good compilers existed, but I still know some assembly. For what I currently do it's used rarely, but it's still quite valuable on occasion. I don't see any reason LLM-assisted programming wouldn't be like that; for sure the various C compilers sure seem like they're trying just as hard to produce results you don't want.
- CharlieDigital 5mo ago> Surely the desired state isn't that nobody knows how to write code any more right? Shaping up like that in my org. At least one mid-career dev says he no longer looks at code. I still look at code and find that agents work best when I write the foundation and then vibe on top of my hand-written code. Works extremely well because agent picks up my style accurately.
- majormajor 5mo agoHopefully your management is trying to answer the following question: is said middle-career dev outproducing their past self, and others who still look at code, with: 1) submitted changes that don't need any more revision than their previous human-written ones when it comes to code review? 2) no increase in bug incidents 3) no slow-down in peer work or future work caused by humans-or-agents having to fight increasingly overly-complicated, poorly-factored, copypasta-style code or god methods? (this might not be evident yet) (Another question is how well is this person doing their job as a reviewer, making sure to keep the product quality bar high, without looking at code?) Anyone in an org with coworkers no longer writing code needs to be making sure their managers have a pulse on the long-term health of the product to see who's doing it well (lots of test coverage, shipping only super-high-quality, refined-from-multiple angles stuff) or just being lazy (shipping first drafts that continually add debt to various files and methods).
- sodafountan 5mo agoI was wondering about this myself, but given everything I know about AI. Won't the vocabulary slowly and subtly change as common people try to develop software, not knowing the jargon? Won't the AI systems learn from the prompts and adjust their understanding of what's trying to be accomplished?
- CharlieDigital 5mo agoIt will regress to the mean. The default output of any agent is going to be Transaction Script, for example. It will never on its own accord start writing Domain Model. As it produces more Transaction Script and sesles its own Transaction Script, it will regress to this paradigm. You can get it to write Domain Model, but that is not its default. I liken it to examples in docs: they are always intentionally the simplest case.
- add-sub-mul-div 5mo agoAnd to operate a self-driving car safely you need to keep your attention on the road so you can take over quickly when needed. But that's not how human nature works. Most people take the path of least resistance. Especially when the primary purpose of the invention is to offer convenience.
- Gigachad 5mo agoAt work we had a dispute over if AI should be allowed in the technical interview, we resolved it by both running an AI allowed and not allowed interview. Something interesting we found is that every candidate either passed or failed both. People who could not program manually without AI were not able to get the agent to complete the tasks either. I've seen people type questions in to the LLM and get the answer they asked for but not the one they needed/wanted because they didn't have the correct terminology.
- thedangler 5mo agoRemember man pages to learn an write C. Guided AI is good if it learns from a book not crap code found on GitHub.
- MathMonkeyMan 5mo agoI think it might have been a cognitive development thing, but at some point in high school, Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" just kinda clicked for me, like I hadn't been reading it properly before.
- Gigachad 5mo agoI tried to get started with programming with books. But I just didn't seem to be getting anything, I'd read the chapters and not really learn or understand it. What really worked was interactive education like Codecademy and some others I have forgotten the name of. Reading a small paragraph and then immediately putting it in to action made everything clear far better than books did.
- OneMorePerson 5mo agoIt's fascinating the different ways human minds work and learn. I'm the same way. It also shows up in other areas like language learning where some people prefer classes and grammar books, and others prefer to just learn via exposure to a lot of content.
- Gigachad 5mo agoI think this is probably just the common experience. Programming is probably best learned hands on rather than through a book, which is why the use of programming books has fallen off a cliff once we got other options. Even before AI I think programming books had already fallen off in popularity. There would be some things books can provide that are probably better than other options, but for a lot of hands on skills it seems best to learn in a hands on way.
- OneMorePerson 5mo agoMaybe, I haven't looked into it too much, but among the people with a preference for classroom and textbook based learning there does seem to be a large degree of fear of failure, which influences what might otherwise be a different natural preference. Fear of failure is exacerbated by making mistakes in public, but it seems to even apply when nobody is there to observe someone making mistakes.
- sputknick 5mo agoHot take: I'm reading programming books more now. There is so much to know about any technological topic and an LLM can tell you all of it, but it's overwhelming. What a book does is disciple and structure what you need to know, and what order to learn it in. Start with a book, grow your knowledge and put it into practice with an LLM.
- geophph 5mo agoI just bought $600 worth of programming books and I’m pretty stoked to read them. Mostly a lot of titles considered “the classics” but my brain works best with hard print materials.
- trevcanhuman 5mo agowould you mind sharing the names of the books you bought?
- thundergolfer 5mo agohttps://teachyourselfcs.com/ https://teachyourselfcs.com/ is an excellent list
- zippyman55 5mo agoThis is a good investment. Your fingers will remember things long down the road and you will be better at having an AI bullshit detector for code development.
- a-tk 5mo agoAfter being discouraged by the ever looming "threat of AI" in programming, I took up some older books. If you didn't get it, I highly recommend "higher order perl" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-Order_Perl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-Order_Perl That book has some of the coolest programming techniques. Even if not all of them are applicable everywhere, truly a good refresher. I don't know perl but write the examples and follow along in JS. Great stuff.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- fartfeatures 5mo agoNobody uses a horse and cart as an every day method of commuting anymore.
- weikju 5mo agoPeople still exercise and make up physical activities to compensate for the more sedentary lifestyle, though.
- jml7c5 5mo agoIt's a bit different than that analogy would suggest. Learning things piecemeal can leave strange gaps in one's knowledge, in my experience. A book is often much quicker.
- casey2 5mo agoAlmost all programming books are more piecemeal than the docs
- misswaterfairy 5mo agoHorse and cart might be antiquated and slow, but my god are they so much cheaper and more reliable than the modern car. Many parts of the world still rely on horse and cart today, even modern societies.
- badc0ffee 5mo agoYou can't just buy a horse and park it in a garage. You need to exercise it, give it vet care, shoes, feed it, deal with poop, etc. Or, pay someone to do that. Unless you live in a place with dirt roads, or really love horses, I think a beater Toyota would win in terms of time and cost.
- trollbridge 5mo agoWell, you can't really just buy a beater car and park it in a garage. You have to perform maintenance on it, and the worst thing for a car is to just sit a long time. A horse has the unique feature that it can create more horses, which is something a car doesn't do. Horses are also unique in being an appreciating asset, which cars are most definitely not.
- corvad 5mo agoI still even now feel that K&R C should be a mandatory reading for CS students, but alas.
- ptek 5mo agoYes I have both copies, prefer the ANSI C second edition my self. I brought another second hand C programming book and when I was working through the exercises in the mid 2000s the GNU C compiler kept issuing warnings as the code used gets() to read strings. :D
- markus_zhang 5mo agoCuriously, I do buy and read tech books. My hobby is legacy OS kernel research so I bought some second handed books on old Linux (kernel 1.2) and NT (3.1). It is fun to research so I don’t use AI often for side projects.
- SL61 5mo agoI enjoy reading really old programming books, the 1997 edition of Learning Perl mentioned in the article being a perfect example. I don't fret over the exercises, but if it's well-written it gives a glimpse into how people thought about technology/code/computers at that point in time, like the tech equivalent of flipping through old newspapers.
- markus_zhang 5mo agoI agree. I also read a few books written by Microsoft people back then. I really enjoyed the writing style and the more hardcore programming environment back then. Wish I could live through that era.
- ptek 5mo agoAre you thinking of getting in to NeXTSTEP 3.3/OpenStep 4.2?
- markus_zhang 5mo agoThank you for the recommendation. That’s an interesting topic. I’m pretty full right now so unfortunately even getting into Linux and NT is a bit hard for me. I was reading VFS but bogged down due to lack of time :/ I also want to get into Solaris, too, because it introduces a lot of ideas back then.
- ddoolin 5mo agoI started learning software in the early 2010s and I read a lot of software books like the ones mentioned in the article. I continued reading them as the years went on, but the last one I bought was probably 4 or 5 years ago. Naturally, I probably don't need books as much as I used to -- I can generally pick up something new and know where to find what I need to find, "learning to learn" and all that. I also think they are better for foundational knowledge; many times the books become outdated very quickly. So if I was gonna attempt to write a database or learn distributed programming theory, I'd probably pick up a book, but if I wanted to learn a specific tool (or most languages) I'd probably stick to the web.
- eterm 5mo ago> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month The crazy thing is that SO is dying so quickly that it's already under half that amount. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...
- DANmode 5mo agoToo early to call, but that is a crazy stat. Wow.
- Gigachad 5mo agoToo early to call? It's hit rock bottom. I've never seen a major site die so completely before.
- NikolaNovak 5mo agoBeyond the slowing you to type, the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation. This is what had me spending money when I could get the reference manual for free - a guide, a book that taught me unfamiliar concepts in top down fashion, and took some degree of responsibility to be both accessible and comprehensive. I love the tutoring of LLM, but to this day as a complement to a guided book. I don't find such guided books in computer science much anymore sadly, but for now I still do it in other venues - French, Biology Astrophysics and such. I grab a book, and then use LLM to supplement my reading as my mind always has a myriad questions :). Not entirely sure why computer science is so radically different - maybe because things change and get obsolete too fast? At any rate, cuddling with a book is still my favourite way to learn a new topic, much as I spend 12 hrs a day eagerly typing and staring at the screen as well :).
- cvwright 5mo agoUnfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare. Younger me really enjoyed some of the game programming books by Andre Lamothe. Most “Learn Language X” books were terrible with over focus on syntax and very little thought into organization.
- NikolaNovak 5mo agoAgreed, Books on specific programming language were indeed tricky. I found books on architecture, systems, or patterns, were more available. E.g. On relational database optimization principles, or Unix system administration, or graphics algorithms and rendering math, etc :)
- wyclif 5mo agoApparently the guy who wrote the Camel book on Perl made less than $1000 from that book. I was shocked when I heard about that because back in the day when I was learning that book was incredibly popular and seemed to be everywhere. EDIT: Edited, not wrote. My bad. That's a crucial distinction. Also, I meant the Llama book, not the Camel book.
- clasplock 5mo agoI've not read a programming book for years, even before LLMs came on the scene. Didn't see the need to when there's so much information online. These days, I don't use LLMs for actual programming but will ask them questions in lieu of doing a web search. It's like documentation I can chat to. Basically a more efficient blog post or book chapter that happens to be dedicated to whatever it is I'm working on.
- matrix87 5mo agoThis corporate messaging of "just use AI, cut as many corners as possible, only retain the essential people and force them to sling slop 7 days a week" is unsustainable. It's wrong for so many reasons. It disrupts talent pipelines. The staff+ people probably don't want to work twice as hard to cover the cut headcount. In general, people prefer to work on systems that are well architected and not some slop that got vibe coded up in a weekend. They (corporate upper management) could've just done nothing and the end result would've been better than whatever the fuck is happening right now
- RickJWagner 5mo agoMy career kicked into high gear some time around 2008. I saw somewhere online where a publisher was seeking a volunteer book reviewer / junior editor. I volunteered, did the best job I could, and posted an honest review via blog. I got more review requests, and a few other publishers contacted me for the same. I didn’t really master much, because I didn’t put hands on keyboard for a lot of it. But I got a good view of the technical landscape, and I accumulated a nice paperback library. Before too long, the free books became free ebooks and some of my contacts needed renewing as natural career progression took place. I let my ‘hobby’ die off as I dug deeper in the topics that interested me. So that era passed. I still have several books with my name in the credits, sort of a souvenir set from the time.
- nritchie 5mo agoNot true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover. In fact, I've probably read each page in "Rust for Rustaceans" at least twice to ensure that I understood some of the more subtle points. I could have developed a half-baked notion of how the borrow-checker worked by fooling around and reading blurbs on Stack Exchange. But Rust for Rustaceans made clear the more subtle points that might have taken years of tinkering to understand. Thank goodness people still write excellent books on computer programming.
- infinet 5mo agoI have a gut feeling that human as a creature learns better when looking at the information from several different angles, both physically and mentally. Been physically I mean looking at the same concept on screen and on hard copy books, perhaps taking notes and mark relevent sentences with a highlighter. Similarly, seeing a concept on physical book and write some short code snippet is viewing the concept from different mental angles. Though I don't have a proof for that and have yet to find a formal research on this topic.
- onemoresoop 5mo agoI learn the same way but there are different people who learn in different ways. Also some people come with some concepts already understood from past experience or education, it’s easier for to pick things up without needing various angles.
- ikr678 5mo agoThe pedagogy suggests that you retain more when you also have a spatial element to what you are reading - eg you recall not only what the text was but where exactly on the page you read it, and perhaps also how far through the book it was. Textbook designers know this and use images, callout boxes and insets with case studies/graphs to break up text on pages so that your brain gets extra context to map 'what' to 'where'. This is (imo) why infinite scroll and mixed order algorithm feeds are such brainrot (even if you are looking at educational content). You try to recall something you read but it was in an ephemeral location in an always changing stream of content.
- Legend2440 5mo agoThis predates LLMs. The internet has been the primary source of programming knowledge for decades. Books are still good for the fundamentals of course.
- oftenwrong 5mo agoI still have my copy of Learning Perl. Mostly because it represents a milestone in my learning. I have kept and obtained a number of other books simply because they are antiquated, special and/or classics that are interesting to read even if they are not that useful to me, like Codd's relational book, or Calendrical Calculations. I hope the AI is trained on these sorts of books, so that the knowledge can live on in a different way.
- dangus 5mo agoDisregarding the issue of AI for a moment, I don’t really think books were ever the ideal way to learn programming. It’s so obviously better to learn programming in a web based medium. Not just for tutorials or code-running environments, but also for having up-to-date manuals and references for tooling as new releases come out. Or, if you don’t like that, e-books are again vastly superior with the ability to search easily without flipping through indexes, copy/select text, etc. Books become out of date so fast, and you live in a hell of manual transcription, which is not actually that helpful for learning despite being highly manual. I also remember dealing with typos and mistakes that were hard to fix as a new learner. Let’s hope someone sent a letter to the author and that the book sold well enough to get a second edition, which I’d then have to buy…but by then it was too late, I’d have moved on. There was a huge bookshelf because there was no better option. Just like Blockbuster video, something far better came around.
- adfm 5mo agoThis post feels misleading or possibly just nostalgic. The books referenced still exist because the people creating the technology are still writing them. They're also creating video and attending conferences (virtual or otherwise). That's not going away anytime soon. But perhaps what has changed is how the information is accessed. Do you need to debug some ancient perl? Sure, ask Claude. You'll get an answer and move on. But if you're looking to learn how to use the next technology before it's mainstream, you'll go looking for that material. And it's there, where you expect it to be. Do you still watch network television or haunt Blockbuster? Times change and the market moves on. The interesting thing is, people like books and they're also available for those looking for a physical artifact to hold. Most of what's available is POD. Depending on the title, you're hitting the print button when you place the order.
- aboardRat4 5mo agoI printed a ton of books from libgen in the past 10 years. Using paper just works better for me. I do use LLMs for asking questions, and other learning tools.
- musicale 5mo agoI almost feel nostalgic for the bittorrent era, when piracy (or unauthorized distribution) was done the old-fashioned way! Though it's a shame that current copyright law is incompatible with building an effective digital library that isn't crippled with restrictions designed to impose the limitations of paper books (or worse) onto ebooks (while removing benefits such as first-sale doctrine.)
- aboardRat4 5mo agoIn the age of LLMs speaking about "piracy" is absurd. LLM users are reading the same books, just algorithmically post-processed.
- thaumasiotes 5mo ago> I almost feel nostalgic for the bittorrent era, when piracy (or unauthorized distribution) was done the old-fashioned way! Libgen is a huge improvement. During the period you're referring to, what was available was determined by popular demand, which meant that books weren't available at all.
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- BergAndCo 5mo ago[dead]
- dev-ns8 5mo agoI recently purchased Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective [0] and am currently working through it with pen and paper. I've only had peripheral exposure to writing in assembly and "systems level" programming so I'm really quite enjoying it. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspective-3rd/dp/013409266X https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspect...
- rramadass 5mo agoNice; This is the only book of which i have all three editions. You might also want to get the 1st edition to understand how the earlier 32-bit programming differs from the current 64-bit programming. You can probably get it for free/throwaway-price. Pair your CSAPP book with Advanced C and C++ Compiling by Milan Stevanovic and you can become a "Low-level System Programming Guru" ;-)
- tinkelenberg 5mo agoDon’t worry, once LLMs poison the well enough by disincentivizing sharing content online, technical books will thrive again.
- chickenimprint 5mo agoLLMs are to a large degree trained on pirated books.
- Lyngbakr 5mo ago> You already know why, more or less. ChatGPT has over 900 million monthly active users. GitHub Copilot has 4.7 million paying subscribers as of January 2026, up roughly 75% in a year. You can’t imagine writing software without Claude Code anymore. I read programming books and use LLMs for different purposes. With books, it's usually not to find a solution to the very specific problem I'm working on. That's what I use LLMs for because they give very focused answers. Books, on the other hand, provide much broader context that help me learn a language. Whereas with LLMs I get a solution yet tend to retain nothing. YMMV.
- musicale 5mo ago> They were thick, they cost about $50, and they had titles like “Learning React” and “HTTP: The Definitive Guide”. The most effective way to make money from open soruce was (for a time at least) to be Tim O'Reilly, Amazon, or Google.
- badc0ffee 5mo agoI used to read a book or two when diving into a new language. But I think the last time I did that was in 2017 when I learned Swift. That was supplemented with a lot of Stackoverflow. I think the next deep dive was in 2022, when I learned Go. But that was completely from online sources.
- ergonaught 5mo agoI've bought (and cracked open) more programming books in the past year than I had in the previous 10. I'm nobody?
- dxxvi 5mo ago> Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore Not true for me. I still read the "Learning Rust in a month of lunches" although I ask AI to write Rust code all the times.
- EFLKumo 5mo ago> The kid who is right now learning to code by chatting with an agent is not a worse programmer than I was at 12, hunched over Learning Perl, retyping examples that would not run because I missed a semicolon. To be honest, I'm 17 y.o., I'm coding by chatting with an agent, but it seems like we can't tell the distinction too absolutely. At the first time writing a React app, I forgot to name a file with a .tsx extension and I used .ts instead, then spotting ugly error lines across my JSX syntax, confusing and sharing with my friend, and laughing this little funny thing all the day. I once spent the whole afternoon choosing a js linter, reading their docs and perceiving different tastes. In my early twelve-ties (uh this sounds funny too) I'm always arrested by configuring Windows PEs, installing different Linux distributions on my PC, etc. Today I still read tech books, alongside videos, articles and also chatbots. Chatbot is a new tool, but there's no doubt it cannot replace other media types and what they bring to us/me. What may I express is that a natural interest in programming or computer things cannot really be overwhelmed by LLM things. I don't know how to use vim skillfully since I majorly used Windows at my early age and I'm not familiar with vim's logic, but this practically doesn't stop anything. I still found Linux's fantasy, at last. And same for LLMs.
- mikewarot 5mo agoIt used to be that you could buy a book and use it as a reference for years. That stopped being true sometime in the 1990s, as the half life of book value declined rapidly. One persistent internet and Altavista became available it was just a matter of time, and now we're there. The whole move fast and break things culture won. Like Chesterton's fence, you don't know what you're got until it's gone.
- atmavatar 5mo agoIt depends on what kind of reference book you get. A reference book on a particular language is going to have a pretty short useful lifetime, since any language of significant popularity will evolve relatively quickly. In contrast, a reference book on general programming knowledge (e.g., design patterns) could very well last a lifetime.
- skydhash 5mo agoYou can still do it too, but you need to see through the fad and not go for the shiniest technology out there. I've been reading "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System" because it's basically the best explanation about OpenBSD as it (and NetBSD) still follow the same general architecture. Another book that's worth its weight is "The Linux Programming Interface" and "The TCP/IP Guide". Also you can probably buy "The Go Programming Language", "Programming Erlang", and "Programming Clojure" and still come ahead. As long as you choose to learn technologies that have thoughtful design, or has a standard (even a de-facto one), you're golden.
- smelendez 5mo agoSometimes I'll be in a large used bookstore, like the kind of cavernous ones you find in places with cheap real estate, or at a charity sale and there will be a book with a title like "Learning J2SE 1.4" or "XHTML for Dummies" that is just utterly and completely useless. I wonder if these books will eventually be interesting, the way old ham radio or slide rule manuals can be, or if they're just forever doomed to irrelevance.
- h4kunamata 5mo agoNobody code anymore!! Before the rise of AI, developers were basically doing copy/paste from StackOverflow. There are few developers who knows how to code. Even DevOps engineer, I worked with CI/CD "specialist" who couldn't work for sht, if you asked him anything outside StackOverflow, he couldn't answer. But there is a silver line for everything..... I am not a developer but I learned to code with Perplexity AI, but not copy/paste, anything I didn't understand I asked it to explain why. I wrote my first python app with classes, functions, 94% code quality coverade, the mock unittest was 4x bigger than the actual code. I can start a python script from scratch without looking at my own examples. I would never be able to do that within a few weeks by looking at forums that often have worse response than AI hallucination.
- shirro 5mo agoIt doesn't matter so much if the LLMs are better or worse for learning things. I tend to think much worse in the long term. The problem is the reduction in choice. Soon we won't have web search. No user generated content. No genuine personal interaction. No blogs. No personal computer industry. No tech book publishers. Its all going to be LLM generated content owned by a small group of people. It sucks. I am in the opt out group wondering what exactly will be left to opt out into.
- bluefirebrand 5mo agoHey if it means anything there's other people here in the opt out group with you Maybe we can build something else in parallel for the other opt-outers
- boothby 5mo agoThere's a wide world outside of tech jobs. Most of it isn't immensely lucrative, but I hear it can be quite fulfilling
- epgui 5mo agoThe “higher level of abstraction” phrase used to describe what LLMs are in relation to programming… That phrase needs to die.
- mrleinad 5mo ago"there are coffee stains where the caffeine blots are somehow still a valid Perl program" Having coded Perl for years, I take that personally, pal...
- buglungtung 5mo agoI use AI to summarize a book because I need to use it asap for my professional works. But I do reading because I enjoy learning process, the knowledge is a bonus, not the goal
- __mharrison__ 5mo agoThe problem is knowledge gaps. You don't know what you don't know. A good book deals with that. For example, my Effective Pandas book teaches best practices that most never learn because the blog posts that train the models are actually espousing anti patterns. (As an author I'm keenly aware that fewer folks are buying books.)
- baron1405 5mo agoI type this comment flanked by my shelves of computer books. Most I keep for sentimental or historical value. My first edition K&R, the first PostScript Red Book, the volumes of The Art of Computer Programming, and many animal books. In addition to what the author said, what saddens me is that most developers today will not have these milestones of their growth as a software engineer to look back upon. Our history is literally evaporating into the cloud.
- tomwheeler 5mo ago> the volumes of The Art of Computer Programming I'd speculate that the number of people who own these outnumber the people who have actually read them by a pretty wide margin.
- baron1405 5mo agoTrue, for me it was a read-on-demand.
- SilentM68 5mo agoI do, actually. Trying to find good material to read for Odin programming language. Most books, are just hard to follow, not newbie-friendly, always gushing with bloat, with things that make the book fatter, making it easier to up the price. Student's usually end up paying the price :( Sol, Off-Topic: If I suspect that somebody in a company, or message board is tampering with a user's account, when they are not supposed to, say by blocking their ability to login, would legal action against the company in question be justified on the part of the user?
- NetMageSCW 5mo agoOff-topic: There is no remedy. What law is being broken?
- SilentM68 5mo agoThis behavior, is unprofessional. It erodes YCombinator's reputation as a company and the trust of its users as a whole, whether they realize it or not. As for there not being a remedy, sure there is. FCC’s Section 230 has no teeth at the moment, but with a little persuasion, a little tugging or whispering in the right ears, 230's teeth can be sharpened just enough to become a somewhat financial annoyance. Now I just need to find the right ear to tug. I appreciate the honest feedback, Sol
- elzbardico 5mo agoI do it a lot, now with the time saved by coding agents, I do it even more.
- system7rocks 5mo agoI love these books. I would like to own every single one of them, as crystallizations of a moment. But let's be real -- some of these books are trash.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 5mo agoLlm learning fosters mediocrity
- daft_pink 5mo agoI do feel that programming is more accessible than ever though.
- pxc 5mo agoMy two favorite non-fiction sections of the bookstore are dead and dying. The computer section, if it still exists, is just things like _Excel for Dummies_, and the philosophy books have all been pushed out by self help and dime-store "metaphysics". But I've started reading programming books again recently, on my e-reader and on my laptop. People are still writing them, and they're still good. We should all go buy some! For my own usage, I don't see chatbots as supplanting textbooks. If anything, they pair well; reading a book from cover to cover gives me the breadth and depth I want, but LLMs are there for tangents and questions that come up along the way. I was reading a book and chatting with Claude like tihs just yesterday, for a few hours.
- quotemstr 5mo agoThere are books about languages, and then there are books about timeless truths. The former? Toilet paper. The latter? Treasures. Worth reading: - Okasaki, Purely Functional Data Structures https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/okasaki.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/okasaki.pdf - The Garbage Collection Handbook https://gchandbook.org/ https://gchandbook.org/ - The Dragon Book - https://faculty.sist.shanghaitech.edu.cn/faculty/songfu/cav/Dragon-book.pdf https://faculty.sist.shanghaitech.edu.cn/faculty/songfu/cav/... (yes, it's old, but I still like the end-to-end, all-in-one intro) - Windows Internals - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/resources/windows-internals https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/resources/win... - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf - Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/philbe/book/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/philbe/book/ - Crafting Interpreters - https://craftinginterpreters.com/ https://craftinginterpreters.com/ - What Every Programmer Needs to Know About Memory - https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf (the best thing Ulrich Drepper ever did) - An Introduction to Modern Cryptography - https://eclass.uniwa.gr/modules/document/file.php/CSCYB105/Reading%20Material/%5BJonathan_Katz%2C_Yehuda_Lindell%5D_Introduction_to_Mo%282nd%29.pdf https://eclass.uniwa.gr/modules/document/file.php/CSCYB105/R... A good programming book gets better with age. If it's really about ideas and uses this or that technology for exposition, so much the better: the more remote in time the grammar of the examples, the more you can focus on the ideas. SICP being in Scheme is an advantage because you don't know Scheme yet; Windows Internals being about Windows teaches you generally good lessons in OS design by forcing you to contemplate a system alien to the Unix you probably know better. It's shocking how many of these seminal books are available for free and how few people read them. Yes, yes, you can get the same information from an LLM, but an LLM won't give you the guided tour through the whole rugged ideas-space and show you a reasonable peak. Order, emphasis, and expository style build intuition, so books (especially old ones) are worth reading.
- rramadass 5mo ago> A good programming book gets better with age. If it's really about ideas and uses this or that technology for exposition, so much the better: the more remote in time the grammar of the examples, the more you can focus on the ideas. > It's shocking how many of these seminal books are available for free and how few people read them. ... an LLM won't give you the guided tour through the whole rugged ideas-space and show you a reasonable peak. Order, emphasis, and expository style build intuition, so books (especially old ones) are worth reading Very, Very True! I have a huge personal library of my own and keep adding to it regularly. IMO, most people nowadays don't want to put in the effort/time needed to learn something complex. Everything has to be spoon-fed and if they don't grok it the first time, then it is the fault of the author/subject/etc. I just don't see the sincerity and commitment to long-term study which is essential to understand any Science.
- softgrow 5mo agoI had a taste of OReilly books through ACM/IEEE. A few years pass and I'm working on some obscure legacy code and a book saved me. Needed it in a hurry so signed up for OReilly books for a year even though only needed it for four weeks. I have renewed it since and enjoy it, being able to dip into topics, just for fun, written by people telling a story. The long form of a book is quite different from SO and new books keep coming out. I'm hooked.
- casey2 5mo agoBooks are more of a unix thing no? I know microsoft had is kernel series but most people used MSDN CDs. Probably for the best that books are going away, kids these days tend to turn them into their entire personality and keep alive bad ideas far longer then they have any right to exist. I agree with the article good code lives on screens, it should be self documenting. If it can't be self-documenting then a tool is the next best thing, then docs, books, If a person has to explain to another person what going on something is very wrong. I also agree that "teaching modes" on chatbots need to be far stricter, I've seen some research in this direction. But it's also on the community to create a software cannon that isn't controlled by some megacorp so your dedication is yours.
- Animats 5mo agoThe decline of programming books removed a constraint on programming language complexity. At one point, the basic set of books for Java was six volumes. That's when language books broke down from sheer complexity. The combination of Google search and Stack Overflow allowed programming to become more complex than anyone could keep in their head. C++ bloated to the point that people who used to be C++ language lawyers couldn't keep up. This follows a general trend. Areas which used to be bounded by the limits of the human mind stopped being bounded that way some time back. This first appeared in corporate structure. Through the 1970s or so, there was an upper limit on corporate complexity. Beyond some point, connectivity problems started to choke the organization. There were classic ways around this, mainly dividing companies into sub-companies with their own profit lines. "The Concept of the Corporation" by Peter Drucker describes how General Motors did that. GM was at the time a group of loosely connected car companies under one corporate roof. A few companies figured out scaling early. Sears was famous for having developed the "Schedule System", which reduced fulfillment overhead from O(N * M) to O(N log M). This allowed Sears to run a giant ordering plant out of Chicago to serve the whole country. But many companies didn't scale well, and choked as they grew. Westinghouse is a classic example. As computers came in, the scaling problems receded. Airlines got their reservation systems under control, and seat utilization went up. Logistics went from warehouses to fulfillment centers, with much shorter holding times in inventory. Chains no longer were limited in size - WalMart, McDonalds, and the big banks could expand to planetary scale. The giant corporate paper-pushing plants disappeared. So did forced organizational simplicity. Companies had, at some level, to be simple. Otherwise they became unmanageable. As computerization proceeded, that constraint was relaxed. Finance achieved previously unimaginable levels of complexity. Until the 1980s, most financial products were rather simple. Now, there's no limit, and the tail wags the dog. Futures markets are far bigger than the volume in the underlying commodity, and zero-sum activity dominates. AI will accelerate this. There will be businesses no human can comprehend or manage. This may not be productive but will be profitable for someone.
- teeray 5mo ago> There will be businesses no human can comprehend or manage. This may not be productive but will be profitable for someone. Which also means that it will probably outstrip our ability to comprehend whether or not such things are actually crimes or whether they should be considered as such.
- smitty1e 5mo agoI still maintain an O'Reilly.com subscription, because it's good to read aan edited book on a topic, and the Google search has just gone to seed.
- jimmaswell 5mo agoI tried to introduce a partner to programming with an introductory Python book one year ago. It was brand new on the shelf in the impulse purchase area at Micro Center. It looked nice on the outside and decently vetted at a glance of the intro and a page or two, I trusted Micro Center (undeserved in retrospect), and I was in a bit of a rush. I gave it to my partner to try out on their own and they started having trouble pretty quick, and it wasn't really their fault - it was using a lot of technical terms and concepts with no explanation that you wouldn't expect someone to know who hasn't taken a few Computer Science classes. And the best part.. it was Python 2.7. Micro Center sold me a brand new, glossy covered "Learn Python" book based on 2.7 in the year Anno Domini 2025. Its instructions didn't even properly tell you to install that version, so if you even make it that far you're going to be lost why the syntax is wrong for every example. Moral is, books are just as easy to strike out on as a bad online resource. Honestly, I feel like Googling "x language tutorial" is probably going to get you the best results much more easily than picking something off the book shelf - if I can't vet a book reliably, and I already know the damn language inside and out, what hope does a newcomer have? There is a good ending at least. Among a bunch of random stuff I got from an infrared spectroscopy shop that was closing down and practically giving away all their cool equipment, I found a copy of K&R C. I'd never read it myself but I'd heard so much about it online over the years that I figured it was as worth a try. So I got the victim of the Python book set up with WSL and gcc, and they had a much better time that time around.
- isityettime 5mo agoI did something similar with my partner, though I didn't look at a shelf in a physical store. We ended up going with How to Design Programs. There were some small terminological things that I helped clarify. (I can't remember what they were.) But overall, I was blown away by how much she was able to just pick it up and run with it. She used just the book and a little bit of help from very cheap and basic LLMs (not for writing code, just for answering questions) did really well, until life got too busy for her to put more time in. Overall I think it's a really good book for this kind of thing: https://htdp.org/ https://htdp.org/ > Moral is, books are just as easy to strike out on as a bad online resource. Honestly, I feel like Googling "x language tutorial" is probably going to get you the best results much more easily than picking something off the book shelf - if I can't vet a book reliably, and I already know the damn language inside and out, what hope does a newcomer have? I don't think language tutorials or "Learn $LANGUAGE" are good targets for introducing people to programming. That's true whether it's a book or a blog post or a YouTube tutorial. You want to teach computational thinking per se before focusing on a particular language. Something like HtDP or _The Little Schemer_ or _Logic, Proof, and Computation_. Even if you want to dive in with practical skills before developing a foundation, you still don't really want books with targets as broad as "Learn $LANGUAGE". You want something like the _Learn Enough ... to be Dangerous_ series, probably starting with the entry on Command Line and then moving on to the entry of a target language (JavaScript, Ruby, Python) in the same series. Then you can move on to a book that tries to teach more or less a whole language, or a programming paradigm through the lens of a particular language. If your goal is to learn programming, it doesn't matter that much if the programming language is obscure or the toolchain is out of date. But if your goal is to learn some language to work with peers in it at work or something like that, then yeah, you gotta check the publication date. For a lot of us, maybe our first programming book or class was presented as a "Python course" or a "Java course" or whatever, but that doesn't really represent the goals of a first encounter with programming no matter what your strategy is.
- tjwebbnorfolk 5mo agoI convinced my mom to buy me a book on C++ when I was 13 (25+ years ago). I made it to page ~75 or so before I got bored of reading, and needed to start building stuff to stay interested. I don't think I ever looked at it or any other language book again after that.
- martheen 5mo agoThat's also how one of my first book that's focused on the language (instead of those focusing on how and what to do to build the cool stuff) feels like. Just pages of things that would've probably keep a language lawyer giddy but my blue-collar brain skip to sleep. Head First series try to take different approach, but by then my brain has already too used to question every single sentence and goes on its way exploring which books simply aren't designed for.
- jonbodner 5mo agoI'm the author of O'Reilly's "Learning Go". Here are the last 13 months of paperback book sales: - Mar 2026: 124 - Feb 2026: 140 - Jan 2026: 157 - Dec 2025: 306 - Nov 2025: 484 - Oct 2025: 218 - Sep 2025: 176 - Aug 2025: 136 - Jul 2025: 317 - Jun 2025: 230 - May 2025: 237 - Apr 2025: 165 - Mar 2025: 367 Sales are certainly down, but it has gone up and down in the past. Since the 1st edition came out in 2021, it has sold roughly 20,000 copies (about 10,500 English paperback copies, 3,800 ebooks, and 6,700 translated copies). The 2nd edition came out in 2024 and has sold roughly 13,000 copies (about 8,300 English paperback copies, about 3,000 ebooks, and about 1,600 translated copies). Most of the money comes from O'Reilly's online platform, not from book sales. That has been declining lately, partially because the latest edition is now over 2 years old, but also I suspect that people are cancelling O'Reilly subscriptions and just relying on LLMs (which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so).
- guywithahat 5mo agoI appreciate your response, it's great seeing real data and getting to form opinions on it this way.
- KnuthIsGod 5mo agoThank you for your excellent book. Your book is highly recommended in the Go community. I will definitely be reading it once I finish "The Go programming language".
- arm32 5mo agoHow do you feel about these LLMs potential piracy of your book?
- jonbodner 5mo agoIt’s not potential, it’s actual. There are court cases and settlements and everything. I’ll be getting a little money from Anthropic. As for how I feel, I think that LLM companies are incredibly short sighted. If I was them, I’d be funding newspapers, non fiction writers, fiction writers, and artists in general in exchange for the exclusive rights to index. They get content to improve their models and the world gets new knowledge and art. But considering the public good is passé and LLMs have done pretty well by stealing everything. This might be why I’m not a billionaire.
- guywithahat 5mo agoI bought a book on C++20 last year when we started a project on it and I read it. I don't think programming books are going anywhere, because they still contain a concise directory full of information on different languages or frameworks. If I try to learn a language piecemeal through chatgpt or blogs I risk missing important details or platform-specific knowledge. I'd believe books on vim are going away but books on languages or other job-essential tools have a use in the market and I can't imagine they'll go away.
- semiinfinitely 5mo agodid they ever?
- weare138 5mo agoPeople still use programming books, they just don't purchase new retail books as often. Books have become magnitudes cheaper for publishers to produce but the books didn't get cheaper for consumers. I went to O'Reilly's site, clicked on the first book that popped up and it costs $67.99 for a digitally printed paperback book: https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/345913182/ai-engineering/chip-huyen/ https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/345913182/ai-engineering/c... Take a guess why so many younger devs will opt to pirate a PDF rather than purchase retail programming books. Publishers are pricing themselves out of the market.
- kartoshechka 5mo agoimo books for programming language should be roughly a guide to docs, with better context collocation and more elaborate examples, otherwise it would be really painful to use language you can't pick up c++ from the docs and the language itself is a monstrosity, and for that you must have book explaining why do you have 30 types of pointers, golang in the meantime have excellent official guide, and you don't really need any book
- jacobsenscott 5mo agoReading a well written programming book will put you ahead of 99% of other programmers using that language. Most programmers learn some subset of a language to get things working, and never learn more than that.
- vladsiu 5mo ago[dead]
- JSR_FDED 5mo agoWith a programming book, you invested time to thoroughly learn something new. The language/tool and its associated way of thinking were now part of your toolbox. You were simply a better programmer going forward. With AI that toolbox doesn’t grow. You don’t become better, everything from now on will be wrangled into shape with the frozen set of skills you have at this point. For some people this is fine. For me the endless learning and sharpening of the blade is one of this most appealing parts of programming, so I hate this.
- knivets 5mo agoStack Overflow provides marginal value when there are LLMs. Great technical books on the other hand still provide tremendous value and complement LLMs in a learning process: a book provides a fact checked, curated set of topics with clear start and finish (a structure) and LLMs help with any blockers or missing context that readers will encounter.
- medwards666 5mo agoLove the closeout of the article: "On page 112 there are coffee stains where the caffeine blots are somehow still a valid Perl program."
- DocTomoe 5mo agoI had a whole zoo of - physical - O'Reilly books back in the day. I still own a few today, but they tend to be less language-specific and more 'best practices'-oriented (Hello, 'Bad Data Handbook'). What made me stop was not LLMs, but that I started to get frustrated by every book spending what felt like 20% of its volume on 'how to properly install this' - something that was little value to me (that's the packet manager's job, and I am not screwing up my installation becaue you like that other processor flag more) - while prices rose. Final nail in the coffin was when O'Reilly decided to aggressively push their subscription model. I'm not paying money every month to get access to a library whose books can disappear at will. I still buy the occasional No Starch Press book.
- submeta 5mo agoThe author is blaming llms alone. And is not even mentioning sites where you can download any and every book you wish. That might have led to decreasing sales as well.
- adityaathalye 5mo agoFunny, I think a dead-tree book (or PDF you won't copy from) is a great format to learn programming from. Retyping things into the editor is underrated, as a form of engaging more viscerally with the material (brains work better when they get to play with the clay), as a way to build muscle memory for the language, as a way to absorb idioms by osmosis, and so forth. Different brains, different strokes, but I think the book format is not wrong, the teaching and learning expectations are.
- blu3h4t 5mo agoIve bought 100 or already more programming books in the last 10 years. Ofc I didn’t read all of them, maybe like half read half of them.
- azhenley 5mo agoGood thing I’m actively writing a programming book! (Reading HN to procrastinate.)
- locusofself 5mo agoThis might be an unpopular thing to do, but lately I've been literally having claude/chatgpt write books for my personal consumption: things to brush up interview skills, python, system design, and even agentic coding. I've also had it aggregate substack posts for me, etc. I have it generate an ePub file, and drag and drop it to my kindle. It's a great way to take information with me, out for a long walk where I can focus on it and absorb it.
- fithisux 5mo agoAmazon taxes books through shipping. It is a plan.
- keyle 5mo agoThe main issue I have is by the time I got my brick delivered from Amazon about SwiftUI 3rd edition, the 4th edition was out. It's a door stopper now. They're also incredibly useless. If I get a digital book, I can search it, highlight and categorize. And it doesn't weigh or occupy the size of a phone book. Many programming books are just gnarly and unpleasant for casual reading (unless it's a small thin book but it won't go into enough details). I won't get into the copy pasting argument because someone will inevitably argue about how you should type the examples by hand to learn more! but not consider how many examples are in a book... So when it comes to buying classics like K&R, get a printed version! But when it comes to 400+ pages, nope, buy digital. So I think people still crack open books, but they're not paper ones nearly as much.
- granter 5mo ago[dead]
- err4nt 5mo agoPersonally, I've cracked very few programming books and I've been building websites since ~2004 back when magazines and books were the best sources for information. Some people learn skills from books well, and some people end up bewildered and confused until they can actually try it out and see how it works. I need to explore to discover and learn. I did find "Eloquent JavaScript" very helpful, it didn't just get me started on JavaScript but actually introduced that whole computer-sciencey side of programming that I hadn't encountered in my various markup and stylesheet language coding. I never finished Eloquent JavaScript though, it was like a springboard that got me into JavaScript (which is dynamic and has an interactive runtime) and as soon as I could be having a conversation with JavaScript at runtime, from there I continued learning by talking to the REPL and seeing what happened.
- cosmojg 5mo agoThey still come in real handy when you're stuck hacking away in a windowless SCIF.
- kelnos 5mo agoI don't think it's fair to blame this on LLMs. The last time I bought or even looked at a book of this type was easily 20 years ago. And I wouldn't have it any other way. I remember my ginormous Visual Basic 3 Bible from the 90s with great fondness and nostalgia, but thumbing through a dead-tree book to figure out computery things is just not a thing I care to do. Having said that, I still think there's room for computer related "books"... of the digital kind, at least. It honestly feels a little absurd to even consider buying a physical book for this sort of purpose.
- EbNar 5mo agoIronically, I just ordered a hardcopy of "Python Crash Course". I want to learn it for personal use and prefer to have the book at hand, rather than in PDF/electronic format. And no, I'm not letting AI or LLMs do the job for me: I prefer (rally: need) my brain to stay active.
- kwstas_el 5mo agoI believe it really depends on the programming book. For introductory topics (Learning Python, HTTP Basics) one is better off with sources from Google or GPT generated since they are much simpler, faster to access and high quality sources out there. But for more low level topics, books like "Designing Data Intensive Applications" are still the first option for most people; you can't easily find corresponding material online that provides the same level of depth, structure, and context.
- DeathArrow 5mo agoThey don't make them like they used to! /s
- _stiletto_ 5mo ago[flagged]
- dmantis 5mo agoI don't feel that LLMs are replacing books for professionals. The problem with LLM learning is not that they can't explain a concept, but you have to know what to ask in the first place. To get a deep proper answer from LLMs you need a deep precise prompt. When you learn the new topic, you don't know about the topic itself, so you need a properly structured interleaved material to grasp new concepts. After you get the concepts from books, you can prompt the LLM for particular non-covered subjects you are interested in. So even these days when I'm interested in some topic, I sometimes even ask the very same LLM to provide me top-10,top-20 books for the topic, with short overview for which type and level of readers and style they are, pick a few and read them. LLM is a replacement for docs and simple questions on StackOverflow, not for the real organized knowledge that requires a few hours session of concentration to understand.
- pdntspa 5mo agoYou can ask them for high-level overviews of a given topic, and then drill down into individual sections of its response. With the most recent iterations, many of the times I have blindly stumbled into something new, it has pushed back with warnings
- ramon156 5mo agoI would argue in the case of Rust that the digital book is much better than the physical one, I mostly bought it to put it on my shelf. Maybe someone disagrees, I'm open to hearing what the book has taught you that the digital docs/book didn't.
- ilhanvalani 5mo ago[flagged]
- exvi 5mo agoi have the full version of that book, Learning the vi and Vim Editors... i still read it!
- stack_framer 5mo agoI'm reading The C Programming Language, 2nd edition (the K&R book), and working through all the exercises. It's a great book, although it's forcing me to admit that I need glasses (the print is so small)!
- vmilner 5mo agoI enjoyed reading Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets by Peter van der Linden after reading that in the early 90s. Also the C standard from the time and the attached 'Rationale' document https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub160.pdf https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub160.pdf (The rationale is 234 pages in). Also this 1995 book version of the comp.lang.c FAQ https://c-faq.com/book/ https://c-faq.com/book/ and https://c-faq.com/ https://c-faq.com/
- damethos 5mo agoI still read programming books, especially if I want to check out a new language and get the gist of its capabilities and how are things are done in that specific environment. Also I prefer to read a book written by an author that I know has the experience and the insight to actually write the book than read random sources on the internet. Or maybe I am just used to it.
- leejo 5mo ago@cylo (I think the author) - get in touch, I'd like to use this essay as part of a photo book project. With your permission of course.
- cylo 5mo agoYes. Reached out via email.
- harrouet 5mo agoI do buy programming books! I even sometimes read them without touching a computer. Studies show that books is the best media to learn. Forget video, books + practice (now with AI explanations) is my learning methodology.
- amelius 5mo agoBut nowadays you can read books, and ask AI to help you read them. I'm curious if someone built a proper interface for that usecase.
- harrouet 5mo agoIf your purpose is learning, use paper. Studies show that it much more efficient than screens to remember information, as your brain physically maps where the info comes from.
- benterix 5mo ago> You can’t imagine writing software without Claude Code anymore. I know it's a hyperbole but repeat a lie often enough...
- oersted 5mo agoI do not think they are too valuable anymore as references you keep coming back to, that use-case has been long superseded by the internet, well before AI. But for a novice learning programming, I still believe that there's absolutely no substitute to reading a book from cover to cover. I have seen a myriad examples of people that have half-learned a language from random snippets in the web (or from AI now), and the struggle never ends. And taught courses or videos tend to be too time-inefficient and too shallow, more of an intro. A good book is still by far the best way to get the complete and cohesive overview of a technology and put it into context. It gives you the kind of mental model that allows you to solve fresh problems from first principles thinking, because you understand the whole breadth and depth of how the technology works.
- kleiba2 5mo agoI once bought a programming book in the 1990s. Since then, I never found the need for it anymore: you could simply find all the resources you needed online (and long before ChatGPT). StackOverflow is kinda forgotten now, but there was a time where you could find the answers to pretty much all your programming questions there, and if not, you could simply post a question yourself (and yes, there was a time where SO was pleasant to use and your question didn't get immediately shut down by overzealous admins). I personally never liked learning a programming language from a book. Like, in the early days of Java, I would get so much more use out of the then excellent API docs than out of secondary material. And of course, programming is one of those disciplines where you really have to just try it out to really make progress.
- Kinrany 5mo agoBooks make the most sense as a guide, not a tutorial or a reference
- porknbeans00 5mo agothat's not true
- stevep98 5mo agoThis seems like a good opportunity to share my recent photos from a bookstore in Tokyo… just a crazy number of computer books. Mostly in Japanese language. https://imgur.com/a/Kygj5IM https://imgur.com/a/Kygj5IM Many of those are not programming books, but they do seem to be recently published, I wish my Japanese was better.
- mnky9800n 5mo agoI always thought it would be fun to write an o’Reilly book. The format seems like a fun way to organise information on learning about a topic.
- hereticles 5mo agoIf nobody cracks open a programming book, then I must be nobody - I read books all the time - both hardcopies and digital. They're my bedtime reading
- amelius 5mo agoI also notice nobody talks about big-O performance bounds anymore.
- rldjbpin 5mo agohaven't done it physically in a long time, but surely virtually. my 0.02 on the matter: things are stacked against you even if you are not strapped for time. a vast majority of the stack is changing too fast and non-digital versions are not appropriate beyond learning the base of a language or high-level design patterns. as publishing became super accessible, there is also a plethora of options, and increasingly difficult to sift between the lower-quality stuff and the diamonds. for most people, very few (kinds of) programming books exist today that could stay relevant beyond the university.
- pmontra 5mo agoI never bought a programming book in all of my professional career, since the 90s. The only ones I did buy were the K&R C book and the Pascal book at university. They were mandatory readings and basically the only way to learn those languages. Perl? Man pages and online. Tcl? Same thing. When I started working, my company had the whole series of the X11 books (my university too) and we had the Java books. We did use them but Javadocs on the web started to be faster to use than books. Then every reference on the web has been more up to date than any book. Javascript, Ruby, Python, PHP, Elixir, Erlang all of them online. I'm sure that I'm forgetting a bunch of other languages. Blogs are about as good as books about patterns, ideas, best practices etc. I just didn't see the point of buying paper when I could read the same things on a screen for free.
- Intermernet 5mo agoI regularly take my copy of one of the volumes of Knuth's TAOCP off the shelf. The stuff in those books will never get old, and I often find myself searching for some algorithm or concept that I know I've skimmed over in the past, but no web-searches or LLMs can give me an answer on. I think it may be due to the lack of open, digital copies of TAOCP available for pillage, as well as the fact that the books don't target a particular language.
- refactor_master 5mo agoI've found programming books good at what the internet isn't always: a cohesive story/presentation meant for a broad audience. I've enjoyed reading some more style-oriented books, largely ignoring beyond the gist. Learning about dependency injection and decoupled architecture, but for Python, completely changed how I viewed the language. I also once read a book on MS SQL Sever 200x, which I don't remember much of, and I don't think it was terribly useful anyway. If I wanted to know the size of a datatype I'd Google it.
- ionwake 5mo agoGreat quote: "...the things they will build with that abstraction will surprise me." It’s bittersweet that perhaps the next generation will never truly understand how utterly insane it was that small companies were paying developers like me good money to read books, then struggle for months to create a simple CRUD app that could have simply been copied, but the company “felt it was right to build their own custom one from scratch.” This would then lead to endless management meetings full of middle managers who never truly felt comfortable turning on a laptop, only for the end result to become a mess of functionality destroyed by committee, shifting goalposts, blame directed at fired programmers, and years of completely wasted human and financial capital — all for a monstrosity built in Flash one year before it was deprecated. My only consolation is that if the new generation never knows the true horror of human ignorance, perhaps it will spare them the generational shame.
- eager_learner 5mo agowhat a beautifully written essay! no AI can write it like this. the same will apply to software. You just wait and see the day when disclaimers like 'No AI involved' would be a signal of high quality, especially for software on which lives depend.
- CM30 5mo agoI mean, it's not just programming books. Books and magazines for a lot of specialist fields are on the way out, since the internet is just a more convenient option. Look at video game or pop culture coverage for example. With a few specialist exceptions, no-ones reading print media for info on them anymore. Things like YouTube and social media and specialist websites are just a lot more practical and up to date. I get that books make it easier to go slowly (or for writers to spend the time researching), but tech is just a fast moving field. By the time something is available in print form, it's probably already near irrelevant for work purposes.
- nticompass 5mo agoI have a small collection of programming/technology books, some from O'Reilly, others from Manning and No Starch Press. I've read them and they have been very helpful, but I will admit that I been buying less books. They take up space, and my shelves are full of these and other books like novels and manga. Also, now when I am trying to learn a language, I just work on a project and search in the docs (or just on Kagi) to find what I am trying to do. Maybe a physical book would be a quicker reference, and maybe I should buy some more of them. P.S. I enjoy finding old computer books (like DOS/Win95 era) at the thrift store.
- QuantumNoodle 5mo ago> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month, which is what it was getting in 2008, before it had finished being launched. Interesting, is SO getting traffic again? I thought it wasn't doing well? Or have they adapted? > The programming book was, when you look at it squarely, always a slightly absurd object. Printed text on bound paper, describing software that lived on screens, which the reader had to retype, by hand, into a screen of their own. The point of programming books was never "give a man a fish" but "teach a man to fish." If you were not hands on, experimenting, and instead copy-pasting you likely didn't get anything out of the book anyway.
- atribecalledqst 5mo agoI've cracked into quite a few programming books over the years and it's pretty crazy how much of an advantage it's given me. I'm a lowly systems engineer, not even a real programmer, but I definitely understand networking better than the majority of programmers at my company because I read Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated 10 years back. (and I read the OLD version from the 90s that was already dated when I read it!) And then I read UNIX Network Programming to help understand all the different sockets APIs and that's paid dividends too, because I get our network programming code better than most of my coworkers too. Then there was that one time I was self-studying computer architecture (Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective) and was able to turn what I learned around and hack our binary code at a customer site because I wasn't in an environment where I could compile our code... and then years later, when I wanted to analyze the ROM of a 90s electronic device with a much simpler instruction set than x86, I wasn't afraid to crack open the thing in Ghidra Let's see, what else have I read that's paid dividends over the years: - Modern Operating Systems (Tannenbaum) - Learning Python (Lutz) - JavaScript - The Definitive Guide (Flanagan) - Programming PHP (Tatroe) - Learning Web Design (Robbins) - Algorithms (Sedgewick) - A book I read whose name escapes me now, about technologies like RS-282/RS-484 and serial communications in general - (I could probably put down Cuckoo's Egg too as an "inspiration" for me ultimately getting interested in computers and networking, and I bet that's not too uncommon a story) It's probably a sign of my age (mid 30s for reference), but when I'm curious about something and want to learn it really deeply - I look for a good book on the topic. (although I'm willing to admit that maybe this process hinders me in some ways, because it means I sometimes spend more time studying than I actually do working with a thing - I have spent a LOT more time reading about circuits than building them - but I like studying so I'm happy either way)
- DanielHB 5mo agoWhy is everyone so focused on programming language specific books? Even when I was in uni before stack overflow I did not find them that useful. All reference docs were already online. However the theory books are still worth reading, if you read any of the intro Tanenbaum books from cover to cover you know the subject far better than everyone not directly working in the subject (and probably more than many that do). Doing any kind of mildly-complex parallel programming code without having a theory book about it fresh in your head should be a crime.
- physicsguy 5mo agoI think this is an age thing but I think young people getting into programming are dramatically underserved by not doing this. I think Claude/ChatGPT are great at getting answer to a specific question or set of questions and even going quite deep on it, but they don't offer the clarity of the human 'big picture' and 'right order for introducing these concepts' view on a topic, at least not yet. Edit: I should say, topic conceptual based books I mean here. Something like 'Designing Data Intensive Pipelines', not 'Learn Python' which is out of date before it's even published
- Toluhis 5mo agoI like books because of their holistic approach and I am saving this as I am seeing some good recommendations.
- skissane 5mo agoMy dad asked what to get our 13 year old as a birthday present. So I asked him, and he said Jon Duckett’s JavaScript and JQuery book - which he realises is a bit dated by now (2014), but he wanted it anyway (in part because he already has the other two books in the series), so that’s what he’s got. And sometimes a “dated” book is still valuable. One night recently I was having trouble getting him to go to sleep because he was getting overstimulated by Bob DuCharme’s The Operating System Handbook (1994) - which is valuable in getting into his head that there exist systems which are very different from his beloved Linux (it covers MVS, VM/CMS, OpenVMS, and OS/400) [0] For years I’ve been buying him books and watching him fail to actually read them-I’m pleased at 13 that’s finally changed [0] I have the hardcover edition which I bought in the 90s, but now you can get a free PDF from the author: https://www.snee.com/bob/opsys/part1intro.pdf https://www.snee.com/bob/opsys/part1intro.pdf
- markus_zhang 5mo agoFor a 13 years old? Wow that’s so amazing. How did you get him interested in Linux and OS stuffs in general? Btw you can probably get him access to the actual systems — there are people offering accounts for those operating systems. I probably have another OS book that covers slightly different ones — instead of IBM mainframe OS it covers CP/M.
- skissane 5mo ago> How did you get him interested in Linux and OS stuffs in general? I’m sure I made some contribution, but a lot of it is just him-e.g. he’s an Arch Linux zealot, I never touched Arch until he started demanding I fix things he’d broken in it. I think he was converted to Arch by Youtube > Btw you can probably get him access to the actual systems — there are people offering accounts for those operating systems. I’ve run MVS under Hercules before, he doesn’t need anyone else, he can emulate and I can help him do it. (Except for OS/400, there is no emulator for that sadly, but I have a free IBM i account from pub400.com and he can get one too.) But he hasn’t decided he wants to yet
- markus_zhang 5mo ago
- zellyn 5mo agoIt's not just AI. I grew up with borrowed ZX Spectrum manuals that detailed the Z80 assembly language, (a clone of) a Red Book that came with the (clone of a) Apple II computer that had assembly listings, and fold-out circuit-board diagrams for the whole computer. I taught myself C++ from the manual that came with Borland Turbo C++ and the Waite Group C book. I laughed out loud at footnotes in the Camel book, which I read from the start through to where it becomes a reference. I read Sedgewick's Algorithms cover to cover for fun when I found it in a local library as a teenager. I borrowed the ancient "build a flight simulator" book from a friend in high school. I've bought books by Kleppmann, Julia Evans, and Hillel Wayne's in-progress book on proofs. I owned the gang of four design patterns book (although I won't pretend -- like everyone else -- to have done more than skim a few patterns!) And yet. For many, many years now every time I've wondered into a bookstore, and meandered over to the fondly-remembered computer books section with a sense of nostalgia, I've just been deeply disappointed and sad. If you're lucky, you'll find one or two books that look worth reading, and the rest is just the product of some giant publishing machine whose sole purpose seems to be to fleece unsuspecting neophytes of their money by pushing on them hastily written books on whatever the current fad is. Often when you look at the publication date and compare it to the release date of the software, it's obvious you couldn't write a _good_ book that fast. And they're all huge. The C Programming Language, Javascript: the good parts, and The Go Programming Language are just about the only three examples I know of where concision was considered a virtue. Most are just fluffy as hell, which is offensive to the kind of mind that wants to learn a programming language. Add to that the observation in the article that paper books for programming languages are inherently weird. So yeah, nobody cracks open a programming book anymore, but there are lots of compelling reasons beside AI, reasons that make you grateful if AI can save you from having to wade through an ocean of dreck. I can imagine a heavily curated shelf of programming books, and it would be a thing of beauty, a collection of potent fireworks shot into the dark of the unknown. But, like, who would go to Barnes and Noble or whatever and actually see it, and actually buy something?
- schlap 5mo agoThis is just because there are more avenues to learn the same thing
- schlauerfox 5mo agoI very much miss OPAMP techincal books in Los Angeles, and later the Fry's technical books section. Barnes and Noble and my local library still carry some. There's just nothing that gives you that random access to the unknown unknowns like a bookshelf. Using an AI to give you suggestions can come close, but as they're now switching to ad placement pushing product instead of really pulling from a mega training pool it will become useless.
- shepherdjerred 5mo agoI’ve felt kinda sad that I haven’t read a programming book recently. I think part of the reason is there is higher ROI (and enjoyment) in playing around with LLMs/agents. I expect it’ll swing back, though. At least I would expect to refocus on learning fundamentals, languages, etc. once the hype dies down. I’ll be very sad if these books don’t exist when the dust settles. LLMs are great but they don’t come close to a well-written technical book.
- IAmGraydon 5mo agoI've recently read multiple texts on C++. I support using LLMs for certain coding tasks, but I want to know how to do it by hand first and to fully understand what the LLM is trying to do.
- floxy 5mo agoI will mourn the loss of programming books. I have maybe 100 of them. But I'm assuming that any books from 2024+ will be heavily AI written, so I'm pretty dubious of buying anything more recent than that. Unless some publisher has some pretty strict no-AI stance.
- insane_dreamer 5mo ago> there are coffee stains where the caffeine blots are somehow still a valid Perl program most accurate description of Perl ever
- guilhas 5mo agoI think this is way before llms the common thinking, "books are too slow" "I want the now knowledge of the latest reinvention of the wheel", but I guess it will make it worse My company does incentive book club reading, which makes it easier Recently we read "100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them" and found interesting how most of the programming challenges haven't changed in years, and are the same for all languages Good books are amazing, like a knowledge vector, that teaches to solve the thing you need, the context it should sit in, emerged from, and possible future solutions
- einsteinx2 5mo agoI’ve been programming since well before LLMs and I never learned well from programming books. It just wasn’t the right format for me. I always learned by picking a project at the edge of my ability and just going for it, looking things up as needed and solving problems as I came across them. I had tried learning from books when I was younger and that was the reason I thought for years that I couldn’t learn to program. Turns out books just aren’t for me (I love reading in general, just not to learn programming).
- littlexsparkee 5mo agoFor what it's worth, they are still popular in my library system - I request new titles from O'Reilly and Manning and see titles from other niches than mine so there's definitely folks that still prefer paper. Patrons get free online access to O'Reilly as well.
- Blackstrat 5mo agoUnquestionably, many people today rely on LLMs more than actually reading. Before that, many depended on the IDE and the web to teach them the language. (What taught them the paradigm?). I think one of the issues though goes back to the bookstores themselves. For years, the quality of the STEM books that were actually available in the store declined precipitously. Perhaps it was the Amazon effect. Barnes and Noble and most independent shops didn't understand the market for the professional software developer. Browsing the shelves for "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" or "Clean Code" and instead finding shelves of Dummies books and IPhone for Seniors, etc. drove buyers to the web and Amazon. Even now, B&N Online can't match Amazon for selection. Since demise of the Borders chain, bookstores have been unwilling to absorb the carrying costs for deeper books that sell less frequently. The feedback loop kicked in and now the shelves are bare. The one thing that still works for me at the local B&N is watching for special orders that were declined by the customer and subsequently shelved. That's how I scored the latest version of the Art of Electronics for 40 something dollars. Those of you who are younger and rely on the web and "AI" will someday realize that your knowledge is less structured, and probably more shallow, than those of us here who are dinosaurs and learned the old way with textbooks and the like.
- john-tells-all 5mo agoI adore programming books... for a specific use case. If I want to learn a lot about a subject, nothing is better than a book: - it was edited, so ideas and text are consistent - the examples worked (at some point in time) - the author has enough time-space to clearly describe a lot of material well Nothing beats a book for an enormous amount of detailed information. Even just reading the table of contents helps to help understand what to focus on during study. My copy of "DevOps Handbook" is covered in tags and handwritten notes. Brett Slatkin's "Effective Python" is way too much for me, but I got a ton out of the parts I focused on. No other media is like books!
- 66yuu 4mo ago[flagged]