41–50 of 180 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.
Wow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this ACM membership worth it?
If your paying $500 for an O’Reilly subscription, then the $99 membership plus $75 add-on for O'Reilly would seem to make it so even if you don't use any of the other facilities: > unlimited access to ACM's collection of thousands of online books, video courses, interactive sandboxes, practice labs, and AI-enabled tools from O'Reilly and Skillsoft Percipio
For me one of the best ways until now to get good quality IT books is (believe it or not): Humble Bundle ( https://www.humblebundle.com/ ) The past year they featured bundles from (quickly out of my head): O'Reilly, MIT Press, Manning, Pearson, Pragmatic Programmers and No Starch Press. Oh, and Packt. But I left that one out because the quality of most Packt books is total shit (IMO). It's the next best thing besides…
At one time I worked at a research institute. It had a huge library that was only partially filled. One of the directors wanted to buy every developer their own Safari subscription. The cost was quoted at around $4K/mo IIRC. I pointed out that it would be far more cost–effective to simple let us request hard copies of whatever books we wanted, and then they would just stay in the library. No one worked remotely at th…
It’s capex vs. opex. A large enough company has a fixed budget for both, and for your situation, I assume that the opex budget had the funds, while the capex did not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, would be interested to read more about this, could you submit the email maybe as its own post? Even as a text version, I actually love the PragProg, would hate to seem them gone (but I guess it’s a foregone conclusion).
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.
Is this because people seek knowledge from LLMs rather than from books now? Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?
If I knew which books were best in category, it would be cheaper for me to just buy those specific books (or video courses, for things like Blender).
But if I had to pay the current $500 price, I wouldn't be a subscriber.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.
Is this because people seek knowledge from LLMs rather than from books now? Or is it because LLMs know everything that is in books, so people don't feel compelled to learn any more themselves?
Reading is never about being fast at doing it.
If you don't want to read a book, read it fast.