Ask HN: Are older programming books useful?

It depends. As you can imagine, a lot of the more practical books focused on specific technologies are going to be out of date within a few years at most. This is especially true the younger the technology is. Something like Lindy's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect) probably applies -- the longer a technology has been around, the longer in the future you can expect it to be around. Things like C and SQL are no longer changing that quickly, even though they are still widely used.

That said, there are a lot of "programming" books that are more technology-independent and contain more "timeless" knowledge about the art and craft of programming (and more fundamentally, computer science). If you want to make sure that your purchases stand the test of time, look for those. You can find a lot of them by searching sites like HN, Reddit, and Stack Overflow for lists of the best computer science and software engineering books. A few examples that tend to show up on these lists:

- Bentley, "Programming Pearls"

- Kernighan and Pike, "The Practice of Programming"

- McConnell, "Code Complete"

- Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month"

- Abelson and Sussman, "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"

- Gamma et al., "Design Patterns"

- Fowler, "Refactoring"

- Kernighan and Ritchie, "The C Programming Language"

just to list a few off the top of my head.

Thanks for the list! We do have some of these, and I'll check on adding the rest to my cart.

I think a considerable amount of what I'm looking at is the more ephemeral type of book, so I feel a bit better doing a more vicious weeding. Thanks!

The most solid fundamentals have been mostly true throughout great software. Even older books can hold a great deal of wisdom.

Engineers now seem to lean on books less, I think it is a great way to learn about tech and programming. Quick searches are mostly optimized to solve one issue. For a bigger scope, I have had great experiences with reading books, including older ones.

Some older titles I have really enjoyed are: Mythical Man Month Code Complete II The Psychology of Computer Programming Joel On Software Rapid Development

And don't forget Knuth's "Literate Programming." I didn't agree with every stylistic decision Knuth made, but reading it led me to clarifing some of my own thoughts.

Let me +1 the previous SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) and Mythical Man Month. I also like DeMarco's PeopleWare. And Loeliger's "Threaded Interpreted Languages." I bought a copy of Doug Kaye's "Loosely Coupled Systems" from bettereorldbooks.com and it looks like it was a library book that should never have been taken out of circulation. It discusses an important aspect of software design that gets little love in the mainstream. I also got a copy of Yourdon's "Structured Design," which was originally released just as OOP was getting big. But... it still contains numerous pearls of wisdom suitable for both OOP and Functional programmers.

Every once in a while I'll get a customer who is using older versions of a language. I keep my old books for these guys, especially after having to repurchase a few books used on amz.