Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

unix.foo

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 367 posts

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#101

Post by wyclif »

cvwright wrote: post #53
NikolaNovak wrote: post #23

Beyond the slowing you to type, the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation. This is what had me spending money when I could get the reference manual for free - a guide , a book that taught me unfamiliar concepts in top down fashion, and took some degree of responsibility to be both accessible and comprehensive. I love the tutoring of LLM, but to this day as a complement to a g…

Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare. Younger me really enjoyed some of the game programming books by Andre Lamothe. Most “Learn Language X” books were terrible with over focus on syntax and very little thought into organization.

Apparently the guy who wrote the Camel book on Perl made less than $1000 from that book. I was shocked when I heard about that because back in the day when I was learning that book was incredibly popular and seemed to be everywhere.

EDIT: Edited, not wrote. My bad. That's a crucial distinction. Also, I meant the Llama book, not the Camel book.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#102

Post by __mharrison__ »

The problem is knowledge gaps. You don't know what you don't know.

A good book deals with that.

For example, my Effective Pandas book teaches best practices that most never learn because the blog posts that train the models are actually espousing anti patterns.

(As an author I'm keenly aware that fewer folks are buying books.)

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#103

Post by skydhash »

mikewarot wrote: post #79

It used to be that you could buy a book and use it as a reference for years. That stopped being true sometime in the 1990s, as the half life of book value declined rapidly. One persistent internet and Altavista became available it was just a matter of time, and now we're there. The whole move fast and break things culture won. Like Chesterton's fence, you don't know what you're got until it's gone.

You can still do it too, but you need to see through the fad and not go for the shiniest technology out there. I've been reading "The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System" because it's basically the best explanation about OpenBSD as it (and NetBSD) still follow the same general architecture.

Another book that's worth its weight is "The Linux Programming Interface" and "The TCP/IP Guide". Also you can probably buy "The Go Programming Language", "Programming Erlang", and "Programming Clojure" and still come ahead. As long as you choose to learn technologies that have thoughtful design, or has a standard (even a de-facto one), you're golden.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#104

Post by baron1405 »

I type this comment flanked by my shelves of computer books. Most I keep for sentimental or historical value. My first edition K&R, the first PostScript Red Book, the volumes of The Art of Computer Programming, and many animal books. In addition to what the author said, what saddens me is that most developers today will not have these milestones of their growth as a software engineer to look back upon. Our history is literally evaporating into the cloud.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#105

Post by a-tk »

geophph wrote: post #7

I just bought $600 worth of programming books and I’m pretty stoked to read them. Mostly a lot of titles considered “the classics” but my brain works best with hard print materials.

After being discouraged by the ever looming "threat of AI" in programming, I took up some older books. If you didn't get it, I highly recommend "higher order perl" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-Order_Perl

That book has some of the coolest programming techniques. Even if not all of them are applicable everywhere, truly a good refresher. I don't know perl but write the examples and follow along in JS. Great stuff.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#106

Post by lmm »

troad wrote: post #38
eterm wrote: post #20

> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month The crazy thing is that SO is dying so quickly that it's already under half that amount. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...

Did anyone actually like StackOverflow? Any question asked would be edited beyond recognition (and usually into brash rudeness). Half the answers were demanding ever increasing proof of work, and the other half told the OP that they shouldn't even be trying to do what they're doing. The only useful thing were opinion based posts from people with domain expertise, and SO kept trying to ban and remove those. It was the…

It was great 15 years ago before the Iron Law of Bureaucracy kicked in and the powermods took over.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#107

Post by SilentM68 »

I do, actually. Trying to find good material to read for Odin programming language. Most books, are just hard to follow, not newbie-friendly, always gushing with bloat, with things that make the book fatter, making it easier to up the price. Student's usually end up paying the price :(

Sol,

Off-Topic: If I suspect that somebody in a company, or message board is tampering with a user's account, when they are not supposed to, say by blocking their ability to login, would legal action against the company in question be justified on the part of the user?

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#109

Post by chucksmash »

troad wrote: post #38
eterm wrote: post #20

> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month The crazy thing is that SO is dying so quickly that it's already under half that amount. https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...

Did anyone actually like StackOverflow? Any question asked would be edited beyond recognition (and usually into brash rudeness). Half the answers were demanding ever increasing proof of work, and the other half told the OP that they shouldn't even be trying to do what they're doing. The only useful thing were opinion based posts from people with domain expertise, and SO kept trying to ban and remove those. It was the…

Yes. In the beginning they didn't ban opinion based posts (that's why you can still find some of them that were left up for "historical value").

I liked Joel on Software, I liked Coding Horror, and I liked the idea that two internet guys could just identify a problem like that, start a company and fix it.

There was a Goldilocks period of several years where contributing answers was fun. I joined in 2010 and was most active until about 2016. It felt good to help people and since it was in the open, it felt like a resume booster as well, like having an active GitHub profile.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#110

Post by sriram_malhar »

wyclif wrote: post #101
cvwright wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare. Younger me really enjoyed some of the game programming books by Andre Lamothe. Most “Learn Language X” books were terrible with over focus on syntax and very little thought into organization.

Apparently the guy who wrote the Camel book on Perl made less than $1000 from that book. I was shocked when I heard about that because back in the day when I was learning that book was incredibly popular and seemed to be everywhere. EDIT: Edited, not wrote. My bad. That's a crucial distinction. Also, I meant the Llama book, not the Camel book.

That’s not true. I wrote the Panther book, Advanced Perl Programming, and easily made way more than 100k. Of the 25-30 or so dollars the books cost, I got 10% per copy, or $2 after taxes. The first print run of 35000 sold within the first three weeks.

The Camel book was already a huge bestseller, and was one of the anchor books of the early OReilly series. It made Larry a pretty penny

Post reply on HN