I buy them, but don’t read them.
They sure do make for a great Zoom background!
Ask HN: Programmers – do you still buy/read technical books?
11–20 of 47 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programmers – do you still buy/read technical books?
#12I generally find everything that I need online. Most of the languages I've learned recently have had their 'bible' books either online or included with the language tooling.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers – do you still buy/read technical books?
#13I used to but it seems things move too fast now, my latest Python book was outdated in 5 years, so I'd highly recommend reading online documentation instead
Re: Ask HN: Programmers – do you still buy/read technical books?
#14If you want well researched content with working code along with the fact that a book in not connected to the internet(yet, smart book anyone?) it's still worth it.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers – do you still buy/read technical books?
#15I make a living selling programming ebooks. So, I guess there are programmers who still buy them.
Ironically, I go through documentation/stackoverflow/etc most of the time :)
Re: Ask HN: Programmers – do you still buy/read technical books?
#16For programming, no. Any programming question I’ve had in the last 15 years has been answered with a Google search, and any new language/technology I’ve picked up has been learned from online articles. Any programming books I still have are language reference manuals, which I keep purely for nostalgia. These too are all online these days. For math/algorithms, yes. There are still many topics that do not have good onl…
Generally my answer also, but I do still sometimes buy programming books, as sometimes I find the online documentation inadequate for me to understand something.
One example: probably contrary to a lot of people on HN, I haven't done a whole lot of web programming, and a few years ago got involved in a project that touched on Angular, Node, VueJS, etc. I found reading (parts of) a few real books to be helpful in getting up to speed in general understanding, but now am back to just using web resources.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers – do you still buy/read technical books?
#17Sure. How else could you acquire fundamental, consistent knowledge about a topic? By random, volatile blog posts?
Re: Ask HN: Programmers – do you still buy/read technical books?
#18Yes. Technical books are an opportunity to have a coherent, well-edited and deep dive into some topic, at a pace I can manage myself. I’d say that I’m not likely to use reference manuals or “cookbooks” like I did in the 90s or 00s, but there’s no replacement for the depth of a good book.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers – do you still buy/read technical books?
#19I read them, don't really buy them as - price/EU/Southern Europe.
Re: Ask HN: Programmers – do you still buy/read technical books?
#20I stopped buying books about programming 20 years ago. They go out of date almost immediately. The internet made it possible to find sources online.