Does your office have a library? • Hacker News Board

Re: Does your office have a library?

#161

Post by systems_glitch » Fri, Feb 17, 2023, 6:04 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #85

systems_glitch wrote: post #4

Yes, and it's all tech-heavy stuff, lots of equipment manuals, architecture handbooks, language manuals, etc. All stuff I've bought because I use it. I've had a few other on-and-off contract workers on site over the past few years. Everyone was far more likely to get wrong answers off StackOverflow than reading the (recommended to them) manual. Oh well, at least the pages don't get dog-eared!

> Everyone was far more likely to get wrong answers off StackOverflow than reading the (recommended to them) manual. In my experience, a system is never really fully documented until it's been used widely enough that everything's been documented 5 times over by different people. For example, I'm sure your favourite language's developers did a great job at documenting the regular expression system. They've probably gi…

The vast majority of the stuff in our dead tree library pertains to what would now be considered ancient tech, computer-wise going back as far as the PDP-8. The problem with searching for Internet answers on that stuff is, most of the time, you'll at best find someone who's interested in diligently hacking on it. What you often run into is someone looking for answers to homework (e.g. the Intel 8085 is still used in a lot of Indian colleges, apparently) or trying to make something "just work" for Internet cool points.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#162

Post by haskellandchill » Sat, Feb 18, 2023, 9:43 AM UTC

Last office job I had a chunk of my library at work, maybe $5k worth out of a $25k library. I ended up getting fired due to politics and of course wasn't allowed to collect my books personally. Had to play telephone over email to get them shipped to me, with a few gems missing that I still have to replace.

Still I'd do it all again because it stimulated our engineering team and led to some fun discussions.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#163

Post by cafard » Mon, Feb 20, 2023, 2:09 AM UTC

At my first tech job, the programmers' office had a shelf of manuals. (I was not then a programmer.) At the next, every new version of Oracle produced three or four feet of manuals for the shelves. A brief stint at another contractor's offices in Virginia showed a real library, by which I suppose I mean that they had copies of IEEE and ACM journals and books by authors I had heard of.

My office at work has an assortment of books, mostly ones that I bought. I don't know of a tech library there.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#164

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 3:51 AM UTC

pcthrowaway wrote: post #60

mysterydip wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Library Science sounds fascinating. I always assumed you master dewey decimal and you collect your certificate as a librarian. What other (broad) topics does such a degree cover?

It's a part of information science. Libraries are systems to organize large amounts of information (not necessarily physical locations, there are digital libraries now). So I imagine you learn sorting and indexing techniques, processes for getting information and metadata in and out of the system, and much more A library is a database of unstructured documents with structured metadata, which might need to be indexed,…

I just wanted to say that this is an elegant and beautiful definition of a library:

"A library is a database of unstructured documents with structured metadata, which might need to be indexed, queried, and accessed in many different ways."

Thanks for that.

Re: Does your office have a library?

#165

Post by evilbob93 » Tue, Feb 21, 2023, 4:13 PM UTC

I worked for Oracle in their Broomfield, Colorado campus. There was an alcove off a hallway that had bookshelves and a library that had been apparently inherited from StorageTek, an acquisition of Sun Microsystems before Sun was in turn bought by Oracle. It was a fascinating snapshot of mid-90s (mostly) tech books, but there were some interesting cultural books including African American studies. Basic HTML books, several O'Reilly books with the bear postcard in them still (I stole one =) ) but the best one for me was a book about OpenVMS Digital Command Language, on which I cut my teeth in the 1980s. It was a favorite place for me to spend a few minutes after lunch in the cafeteria on my way back to my desk.

I currently work for Western Digital and recently someone put a bunch of tech books out on a credenza in one of the collaboration areas with a note inviting people to borrow them. Not exactly a library, but it reminded me of the nostalgia people are expressing here about the big batches of books we used to lug around from cubicle to cubicle (often using an office chair).