Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

It's also relative to the employment numbers.

Companies are shrinking body counts, so you have less buyers of programming books.

The main issue I have is by the time I got my brick delivered from Amazon about SwiftUI 3rd edition, the 4th edition was out. It's a door stopper now.

They're also incredibly useless. If I get a digital book, I can search it, highlight and categorize. And it doesn't weigh or occupy the size of a phone book. Many programming books are just gnarly and unpleasant for casual reading (unless it's a small thin book but it won't go into enough details).

I won't get into the copy pasting argument because someone will inevitably argue about how you should type the examples by hand to learn more! but not consider how many examples are in a book...

So when it comes to buying classics like K&R, get a printed version! But when it comes to 400+ pages, nope, buy digital.

So I think people still crack open books, but they're not paper ones nearly as much.

Personally, I've cracked very few programming books and I've been building websites since ~2004 back when magazines and books were the best sources for information. Some people learn skills from books well, and some people end up bewildered and confused until they can actually try it out and see how it works. I need to explore to discover and learn.

I did find "Eloquent JavaScript" very helpful, it didn't just get me started on JavaScript but actually introduced that whole computer-sciencey side of programming that I hadn't encountered in my various markup and stylesheet language coding. I never finished Eloquent JavaScript though, it was like a springboard that got me into JavaScript (which is dynamic and has an interactive runtime) and as soon as I could be having a conversation with JavaScript at runtime, from there I continued learning by talking to the REPL and seeing what happened.

I don't think it's fair to blame this on LLMs. The last time I bought or even looked at a book of this type was easily 20 years ago.

And I wouldn't have it any other way. I remember my ginormous Visual Basic 3 Bible from the 90s with great fondness and nostalgia, but thumbing through a dead-tree book to figure out computery things is just not a thing I care to do.

Having said that, I still think there's room for computer related "books"... of the digital kind, at least. It honestly feels a little absurd to even consider buying a physical book for this sort of purpose.

Ironically, I just ordered a hardcopy of "Python Crash Course". I want to learn it for personal use and prefer to have the book at hand, rather than in PDF/electronic format. And no, I'm not letting AI or LLMs do the job for me: I prefer (rally: need) my brain to stay active.