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

111–120 of 367 posts

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#111

Post by dd8601fn »

lmm wrote: post #106
troad wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also it solved the Experts Exchange problem, which was an absolute cancer on the web for years before Stack Overflow destroyed them.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#114

Post by ikr678 »

infinet wrote: post #70
nritchie wrote: post #31

Not true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover. In fact, I've probably read each page in "Rust for Rustaceans" at least twice to ensure that I understood some of the more subtle points.…

I have a gut feeling that human as a creature learns better when looking at the information from several different angles, both physically and mentally. Been physically I mean looking at the same concept on screen and on hard copy books, perhaps taking notes and mark relevent sentences with a highlighter. Similarly, seeing a concept on physical book and write some short code snippet is viewing the concept from differ…

The pedagogy suggests that you retain more when you also have a spatial element to what you are reading - eg you recall not only what the text was but where exactly on the page you read it, and perhaps also how far through the book it was.

Textbook designers know this and use images, callout boxes and insets with case studies/graphs to break up text on pages so that your brain gets extra context to map 'what' to 'where'.

This is (imo) why infinite scroll and mixed order algorithm feeds are such brainrot (even if you are looking at educational content). You try to recall something you read but it was in an ephemeral location in an always changing stream of content.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#115

Post by aboardRat4 »

musicale wrote: post #67
aboardRat4 wrote: post #47

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.

I almost feel nostalgic for the bittorrent era, when piracy (or unauthorized distribution) was done the old-fashioned way! Though it's a shame that current copyright law is incompatible with building an effective digital library that isn't crippled with restrictions designed to impose the limitations of paper books (or worse) onto ebooks (while removing benefits such as first-sale doctrine.)

In the age of LLMs speaking about "piracy" is absurd. LLM users are reading the same books, just algorithmically post-processed.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#116

Post by [deleted] »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #110
wyclif wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#117

Post by cyberrock »

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…

For me the main problem of SO isn't even the moderation or human interaction. Even if a question is answered successfully, the entries have a short shelf life because modern APIs move and break so quickly. For example, I tried learning Ansible only through books and SO, and it was just frustrating. ansible_sudo_pass was deprecated for ansible_become_pass, but there are still many books and SO questions that still reference ansible_sudo_pass.

In the Good Old Days (or my rose-tinted memories of them), Java/C books and answers will always work even if it's not idiomatic, and JS/Python material might break once in a decade over a major migration like Python 2 to 3. Now I look at Ansible or Zig, copy a simple toy program from SO or GH, and just find that it doesn't work, because `sudo` became `become` and `fs` became `io`. There is simply no way for books or SO to keep up.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#118

Post by smallerize »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #110
wyclif wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The 4th edition authors included brian d foy, who said "I think Tom [Christiansen] and I worked for about two years to produce the current edition. I certainly wouldn't want to spend that much time again to make less than $1,000... It's a huge effort from the editors and proofreaders and the book won't sell enough to make back the effort they put into it." https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/1ns5r9n/comment/ngmvt...

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#120

Post by pxc »

My two favorite non-fiction sections of the bookstore are dead and dying. The computer section, if it still exists, is just things like _Excel for Dummies_, and the philosophy books have all been pushed out by self help and dime-store "metaphysics".

But I've started reading programming books again recently, on my e-reader and on my laptop. People are still writing them, and they're still good. We should all go buy some!

For my own usage, I don't see chatbots as supplanting textbooks. If anything, they pair well; reading a book from cover to cover gives me the breadth and depth I want, but LLMs are there for tangents and questions that come up along the way. I was reading a book and chatting with Claude like tihs just yesterday, for a few hours.

Post reply on HN