I printed a ton of books from libgen in the past 10 years. Using paper just works better for me. I do use LLMs for asking questions, and other learning tools.
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Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
291–300 of 367 posts
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#292I'm the author of O'Reilly's "Learning Go". Here are the last 13 months of paperback book sales: - Mar 2026: 124 - Feb 2026: 140 - Jan 2026: 157 - Dec 2025: 306 - Nov 2025: 484 - Oct 2025: 218 - Sep 2025: 176 - Aug 2025: 136 - Jul 2025: 317 - Jun 2025: 230 - May 2025: 237 - Apr 2025: 165 - Mar 2025: 367 Sales are certainly down, but it has gone up and down in the past. Since the 1st edition came out in 2021, it has s…
How do you feel about these LLMs potential piracy of your book?
It’s not potential, it’s actual. There are court cases and settlements and everything. I’ll be getting a little money from Anthropic.
As for how I feel, I think that LLM companies are incredibly short sighted. If I was them, I’d be funding newspapers, non fiction writers, fiction writers, and artists in general in exchange for the exclusive rights to index. They get content to improve their models and the world gets new knowledge and art. But considering the public good is passé and LLMs have done pretty well by stealing everything. This might be why I’m not a billionaire.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp seemed to work out well. It’s always more complex than you think
Are YouTube and WhatsApp social media?
You named the two biggest platforms [0], YouTube and WhatsApp are the social media.
This is kinda like asking if Saudi Arabia and Russia are petrostates lol.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#294I like books because of their holistic approach and I am saving this as I am seeing some good recommendations.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
>which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... I wonder how they'd think about it if they had created something (meaningful) that was subjected to this. I love Go and learned it a lot in the past 2 years but ultimately put it down in favor of more "batteries included" solutions as I don't trust myself enough as a d…
I have a different impression, that the folks here are divided in this issue, with a half being AI maximalists saying it's a necessary evil while the other half condemning such practices, maybe not as much as to protect copyright per se, but because there are two different measures here. While teenagers get ridiculous fines for sharing MP3, big corp gets the free pass for stealing data on a industrial scale.
And another half being copyright abolitionists like me who don't care about AI at all but see copyright as essentially a societal fiction that even if it was useful in the past is now no longer, or rather, only useful to big corporations to throw their weight around like Disney who lobbied the government to implement their infamous Mickey Mouse laws with ridiculous copyright term limits.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a different impression, that the folks here are divided in this issue, with a half being AI maximalists saying it's a necessary evil while the other half condemning such practices, maybe not as much as to protect copyright per se, but because there are two different measures here. While teenagers get ridiculous fines for sharing MP3, big corp gets the free pass for stealing data on a industrial scale.
And another half being copyright abolitionists like me who don't care about AI at all but see copyright as essentially a societal fiction that even if it was useful in the past is now no longer, or rather, only useful to big corporations to throw their weight around like Disney who lobbied the government to implement their infamous Mickey Mouse laws with ridiculous copyright term limits.
I didn't want to go into this topic, but in right here with you, I'm an information access anarchist.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... I didn't have a problem with it when it was Aaron Swartz, not sure why I should have a problem with it when others do it.
Aaron Swartz never did whatever it was he was going to do. He was caught and hounded to death before that. But he was working with scientific papers— the outputs of public institutions — and his likely goal was releasing them to the public . What proprietary AI companies have done in training LLMs on every book in existence is nothing like that.
The strange thing is he picked a fight with a store of humanities papers rather than scientific ones.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#298@cylo (I think the author) - get in touch, I'd like to use this essay as part of a photo book project. With your permission of course.
Yes. Reached out via email.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#299My dad asked what to get our 13 year old as a birthday present. So I asked him, and he said Jon Duckett’s JavaScript and JQuery book - which he realises is a bit dated by now (2014), but he wanted it anyway (in part because he already has the other two books in the series), so that’s what he’s got.
And sometimes a “dated” book is still valuable. One night recently I was having trouble getting him to go to sleep because he was getting overstimulated by Bob DuCharme’s The Operating System Handbook (1994) - which is valuable in getting into his head that there exist systems which are very different from his beloved Linux (it covers MVS, VM/CMS, OpenVMS, and OS/400) [0]
For years I’ve been buying him books and watching him fail to actually read them-I’m pleased at 13 that’s finally changed
[0] I have the hardcover edition which I bought in the 90s, but now you can get a free PDF from the author: https://www.snee.com/bob/opsys/part1intro.pdf
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
I cancelled my O'Reilly subscription because it's cheaper for me to buy the books from the publisher. I go through one book every few months. I thought I'd go through more with unlimited access but I didn't. $539.88 a year vs maybe $140-$200 I spend on books (I take advantage of discount codes when they come up). I also like to go back to books. I cannot do that with the O'Reilly platform when a subscription ends. I…
I'm similar, I think perhaps it's a generational thing which slightly modified the title in a pedantic way. The people who "grew up" with text books still crack new ones and old ones. The current generation turning 18-21 don't. It surprises me because I'm often asked why I knew X or Y odd perhaps esoteric fact or design pattern. Usually it's because I came across it in a book interested in something else. It's that p…
Surely people still use textbooks for formal education? This has to be something that happens later.