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I've read over 500 fiction books and 2000+ non-fiction. I've read many of the big thick classics like Moby Dick, War & Peace, Infinite Jest. I've kept a sprea

• pdpi 12y ago
  > 15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? Not saying it's better or worse, but I'm willing to say that the understanding you'll get from blogs is going to be be different than from a long-form book. Books get the benefit of knowing where they left off one chapter, and picking it up on the next. Unless you're reading a long series of posts on the same blog (which, in the limit, approaches reading a book), reading blog posts will lack that continuity, and I find them inferior for building up a basic understanding of a topic. What blogs do really well, IMO, is for teaching you well-isolated techniques, or other such limited-scope ideas. Your experience with C++ And Golang are in no way, shape or form comparable. If you've been doing C++ for 15 years, Golang is a comparatively small learning curve. You just need to pick up on a few syntactic differences and you'll be at that basic level of competence that books will give you, and you're ready for the single-topic, specialized learning that you'll get from blogs.
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  • mattmanser 12y ago
    Every single programming book in the world after you've read the first one: Chapter 1: Simple types (um, could have done this in a page) Chapter 2: Complex types (this too) Chapter 3: How you can compile from the command line (even though no-one in their sane mind does this in this language) Chapter 4: Inheritance (oh god, please stop) Chapter 5: Conditional statements (no, for the love of god stop) Chapter 6: Loops (right, I'm skipping some chapters) Chapter 15: Trangonian Complex Pulsar boofs and why you should use them for everything (even though no-one does and never will because they suck) Chapter 16: How to make a program (this chapter should have been the entire book) Chapter 17: How to debug (lots of hand waving and no actual details on how to actually debug the program) Appendix: Listing every word used in the book in alphabetical order and on which pages each was mentioned. CD: With a 3 year out of date IDE, possibly abandoned, and if you're really lucky some fairly benign malware
    • noir_lord 12y ago
      Back in the day that was every dèlphi book to a tee.
    • coliveira 12y ago
      It looks like you only read Deitel & Deitel books.
    • dunmalg 12y ago
      >Appendix: Listing every word used in the book in alphabetical order and on which pages each was mentioned. That's the Index. The Appendix is where they list FTP and web sites that are long defunct, sample code for interfacing with a discontinued piece of hardware, and of course an ASCII table.
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    • Someone 12y ago
• Animats 12y ago
  "15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos?" That's a real problem. You can't write and sell a book for a fast-changing language. (Go may have stabilized enough for a printed book. A useful Rust book is impossible right now.) A writer and publisher can't invest the time and effort to produce a book that will be obsolete when it ships.
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  • vlasev 12y ago
    This is why it would be neat to have the book in an online format that can be updated from time to time. Something more than a blog, manual or wikipedia. That's in case one wants a book NOW and wouldn't want to wait until the language stabilizes.
    • jacalata 12y ago
      Check out O'Reilly early release books.
• Retra 12y ago
  Whenever I real long-form books, my mind will occasionally wander into other areas, while my eyes keep reading on. I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read. This isn't just an internet-fueled lack of attention, it's how I've always read, and how I image most people read most of the time. The difference is with a website, you can go investigate your immediate thoughts rather than committing to the re-read. It is lazier, maybe. It's probably not great if you want to learn something in depth and stay focused on it for long periods of time.
  • kiba 12y ago
    Typical mind fallacy is thinking that the way your mind operates is automatically how everyone's mind operate.
    • Retra 12y ago
      Well, I'm no freak of nature, either.
      • nsomaru 12y ago
        Wouldn't say it's about being 'normal' or a 'freak.' If you haven't cultivated the habit of reading, it's not effortless (like most things). When things aren't effortless (or close thereto), its easy for an undisciplined mind to wander. If it's something that you value, you will do it enough that it becomes effortless. Perhaps the author missed that point?
        • walljm 12y ago
          Though your point about cultivating the discipline is applicable, not all brains process data the same way, and its possible the posters habit is a factor of biology not effort.
  • jader201 12y ago
    "I'll have to continually go back and re-read what I feel like I've just read." This is me. "and how I image most people read most of the time." I wish I knew if this were true. I've always felt that I have some sort of "disorder" or some form of ADHD or something that causes my mind to wander anytime I try to read a book. I'm a terribly slow reader for this reason (at least when it comes to books -- internet articles, for some reason, don't seem to have this same effect on me), and as a result, I've not read too many books at all. I mostly get my information in smaller bursts. Come to think of it, whenever I see what I consider super long articles posted on HN, and a ton of discussion about how great the article was, I feel terribly inadequate that I can't read said article in less than an hour (or more). Short articles I'm fine with, it's the longer ones -- and books -- that I struggle with. And it's certainly not the result of any "conditioning" from reading short internet articles all the time -- I've been like this since long before the era of blogs and HN. Would love it if someone could shed some light on this.
• sanderjd 12y ago
  Over the years, I've found myself naturally reading fewer and fewer technology-specific books but more and more books on concepts and fundamentals. I find that the internet has the most up-to-date and well-organized information about specific technologies, but that the "classics" do a much better job of motivating and explaining deeper material than typical internet resources. Thanks for the trivia about Art Garfunkel! I do much the same thing on Goodreads, but I started fairly recently, so I'm sure I'm missing a few.
• plaguuuuuu 12y ago
  It depends. People used to read 500 page books on compilers. Would you read an equivalently long blog article on compilers? With the Internet we've gained the ability to more readily acquire knowledge in little bits at a time, over a lot of areas. But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth. And thus we get more shallow levels of understanding, but across a wider range of topics. This explains a lot of arguments on the internet.
  • klibertp 12y ago
    > But most of us are incapable of reading a really huge article in depth It's not a "capability", it's a skill. The problem is it's becoming less and less important in everyday life for most people, which in turn makes them abandon its training. As with most skills, without training you become worse at it with time. I'm not sure if that's good or bad thing that you can now learn without having mastered this skill. Is the understanding you gain via lots of small chunks of knowledge worse than the one you get from reading The Dragon Book? I don't know; looks like a good topic for research in cognitive science. Personally I do like reading long and involved texts, but I too learned to enjoy it before the Internet became popular. I don't know if I'd be equally interested in such texts had I started just a few years later.
  • davidgerard 12y ago
    You mean, have I read these books when the entire thing is put on the web? Yes.
• sehugg 12y ago
  You won't get very many perspectives from pre-1995 without reading books, though.
• zaphar 12y ago
  When I was an introverted teenager I read 500 books in one summer. My mom tracked them all in a notebook because she wanted to know just what exactly I was reading. To this day I have zero difficulty finishing a book. My problem has always been stopping. I'm practically clinically unable to disengage from a book once I've started. Enough so that I have to meter my reading to prevent myself from disappearing for months on end. Not even the internet has made a dent in that. In some ways I wish I were a little more like the author. It would be nice to not feel a little worried when I start a book that I'll go so deep I'll miss something in the world around me.
  • vlasev 12y ago
    Umm, 500 books in one summer? Yeah right! What kind of books? Were they long? That's over 4 books per DAY! I don't think so.
    • oldmanjay 12y ago
      why, because you haven't done it? your tone certainly doesn't convince me you have much else as a point.
      • vlasev 12y ago
        Well, no, I don't have MUCH else as a point. If you're reading that fast you probably not going to read as well. Obviously we're not going for perfect retention here but still. That's a ridiculous amount of text to go through in such a short span of time. I feel like at that point it starts being less about reading and more about adding numbers to a list. But I digress.
        • itsybitsycoder 12y ago
          No, I was a huge bookworm as a kid and I read almost as much as that in the summers. It wasn't about racking up points, just pleasure reading. When you are reading for fun and not for learning, you can go for a lot longer without getting tired and skip all the boring parts. It's not that much different than burning through an entire season of your favorite TV show, or through an entire single-player game, in a weekend.
• coldtea 12y ago
  >With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana. This "unquantifiable intellectual nirvana" was used to be called "civilization".
• ryandrake 12y ago
  When I was a teenager, I had time to read constantly. Now that I'm an adult, with a job that demands long hours, a wife and kid, and responsibilities, my entire day is blocked out hour-by-hour in the calendar. I simply have no time to pour through a 1,000 word article let alone a 500 page book. I don't even watch movies anymore. It's quicker to just head to Wikipedia and get the gist of it. Quite honestly with 90% of media out there today, the 2 sentence summary is enough.
• madaxe_again 12y ago
  I cannot count what I have read. Growing up (6-12) I had no access to digital tech, apart from a BBC micro, no television, no comics, no games other than chess. The only available recreational activities were reading or spending time outdoors. I did both in droves, often simultaneously, and it was bad enough that I'd often be caught reading a book under my desk in class. Mind, the school library only comprised "literature" - no kids books, Harry Potter was a gleam in jk's eye, it was Tolstoy, Homer, Proust, Euripides, Dickens, whatever a nine year old is supposed to read. Come to think of it, reading in class was only punishable by the book being confiscated until the end of class. I remember in my miserable year of middle school in the U.S. being caught reading, and they not only confiscated the book but suspended me. It was a serious infraction in their eyes, as you were only allowed to read pre-approved books on school grounds. Perhaps people don't read because educational systems for the most part actively discourage it. Initiatives which focus on getting kids to read more tend to be about appearances and metrics, not kids reading. They also tend to turn reading into this exotic, "other", task/chore in the minds of most due to shit like "you must read 500 words tonight" - I remember in 7th grade kids bursting into tears in response to that sort of thing, so well had their aversion therapy taken root. Me, I'd ban kids from all except the most primitive digital technology until their teens, as well as all other sources of manufactured "fun". Reading is fun, but we have forgotten this. Now it has to be loud and sparkling and expensive, or it's just not fun for our crack-addled minds.
  • mauricemir 12y ago
    I remember along with one or two others being allowed to read on my own as we where so much faster/better at reading than our peers. I had a raeding age of 20 at 10 Thease days we would be forced into the Ofstead approved learning outcomes - or alternatively gotten rid of to game the schools figures
  • itsybitsycoder 12y ago
    > you were only allowed to read pre-approved books on school grounds. Wow, that is just horrendous.
    • madaxe_again 12y ago
• anarazel 12y ago
  > With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana. Isn't the point is that the author of the article actually does enjoy reading books. And feels it's helpful for him personally? And that despite that he'd not managed to read in a satisfying manner for years; because he'd let him get to "addicted" to short term distractions? I feel with the author; I still manage to read more than five books, but there's weeks were that's not the case. To a large degree because I let myself get distracted in a similar way. Without it being beneficial to myself or others.