31–40 of 47 posts
If I'm learning tough new concepts, I usually start off with a good YouTube video and then fill it out with books. For whatever reason, although I read a lot of books, that seems to work better these days.
Occasionally will spring for a hardcopy book form.
True, most are outdated fairly quickly and few have long lasting value beyond 1-2 years. But when done right, nothing is better than a good text to guide you from beginner to intermediate, or intermediate to advanced. I've tried watching video but it just doesn't seem like an efficient mode (for most video courses, there are exceptions and wonderful video courses).
I used to purchase many physical technical books, but now only keep a select few (which is still probably a good 200+ books) on my shelves, mostly the classics, e.g. GPU gems, game programming gems, numerical recipes, etc. Now I pick up digital versions of the books and make sure I can get them in PDF format. I have a few of the Fujitsu Quadernos for reading books these days, which makes a huge difference to trying to read on a smaller tablet.
Generally I avoid picking up books on "fast moving topics" e.g. the latest web framework de jeur that has gone through 19 versions since the author started writing the book and when I eventually purchase it.
There are some gems out there, but there are also a lot of mediocre books.
Some have commented that a Google search is sufficient. It might well be for asking a single focused question. But a book will provide both breadth and depth. If you want to actually understand a whole subject area, then you can read the comprehensive coverage of a topic by an expert which has been properly written and reviewed. It's a lot more productive than random blog posts and stack overflow discussion in the longer term.
When I compare my knowledge and understanding on multiple subjects with younger co-workers in several of my previous jobs, one common theme is that they haven't read up in detail on many subjects, and it really does show. I'm someone people go to when they get stuck, and a frequent comment is how I know all the esoteric details of systems and understand how everything fits together. The answer is that I read, learned and understood many many shelves worth of books, while others couldn't be bothered. Randomly hacking and googling stuff can only take you so far; becoming an expert takes a bit more effort.
however, i don't reference them as much as i did when I was starting out. stack overflow and the like (along with _good_ man pages) have reduced the need for that
I just purchased Jon Gjengset's "Rust for Rustaceans", since most online documentation I've found on Rust assumes you don't understand or just don't care about how computers actually work.