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Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

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Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#121

Post by quotemstr »

There are books about languages, and then there are books about timeless truths. The former? Toilet paper. The latter? Treasures. Worth reading:

- Okasaki, Purely Functional Data Structures https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/okasaki.pdf

- The Garbage Collection Handbook https://gchandbook.org/

- The Dragon Book - https://faculty.sist.shanghaitech.edu.cn/faculty/songfu/cav/... (yes, it's old, but I still like the end-to-end, all-in-one intro)

- Windows Internals - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/resources/win...

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf

- Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/philbe/book/

- Crafting Interpreters - https://craftinginterpreters.com/

- What Every Programmer Needs to Know About Memory - https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf (the best thing Ulrich Drepper ever did)

- An Introduction to Modern Cryptography - https://eclass.uniwa.gr/modules/document/file.php/CSCYB105/R...

A good programming book gets better with age. If it's really about ideas and uses this or that technology for exposition, so much the better: the more remote in time the grammar of the examples, the more you can focus on the ideas. SICP being in Scheme is an advantage because you don't know Scheme yet; Windows Internals being about Windows teaches you generally good lessons in OS design by forcing you to contemplate a system alien to the Unix you probably know better.

It's shocking how many of these seminal books are available for free and how few people read them. Yes, yes, you can get the same information from an LLM, but an LLM won't give you the guided tour through the whole rugged ideas-space and show you a reasonable peak. Order, emphasis, and expository style build intuition, so books (especially old ones) are worth reading.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#122

Post by recursivecaveat »

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…

I always thought it was a perfectly fine service for lookup. Asking a question though required a very specific confluence of circumstances to actually be a useful thing to do, so I only did that like 1-2 times in many years of reading it from google.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#123

Post by wyclif »

smallerize wrote: post #118
sriram_malhar wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Yes, you're right. That is the comment I was referring to.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#124

Post by quotemstr »

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…

> I have a gut feeling that human as a creature learns better when looking at the information from several different angles

Ever write a piece of code, pore over each line, test the hell out of it, and only when you actually submit the PR and see the diff rendered in your review tool that you spot some totally bone-headed thing you've done?

Viewing a familiar concept in a new context gives you new insights with surprising frequency. Context shifts the priors in the mind. That's why, yes, combining reference/LLMs/tutorials and comprehesive pedagogic tours on rails gives you the best perspective on a new domain.

(BTW: it's due to this effect that company offsites and retreats are good investments, not wastes of money.)

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#125

Post by softgrow »

I had a taste of OReilly books through ACM/IEEE. A few years pass and I'm working on some obscure legacy code and a book saved me. Needed it in a hurry so signed up for OReilly books for a year even though only needed it for four weeks. I have renewed it since and enjoy it, being able to dip into topics, just for fun, written by people telling a story. The long form of a book is quite different from SO and new books keep coming out. I'm hooked.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#126

Post by GMoromisato »

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...

Ouch! They are down to ~1,300 questions per month. If we assume a user asks 1 question per year, and we assume 50 lurkers for every one who asks a question, we're at 800K monthly visitors.[1]

That is tragically low!

[1] 1300 x 12 x 51 = ~800K. x12 because every month, 1 user out of twelve asks a question, and x51 because there are 50 lurkers for each poster. I'm sure my assumptions are questionable, and curious about corrections, but we're still at very low numbers.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#127

Post by casey2 »

Books are more of a unix thing no? I know microsoft had is kernel series but most people used MSDN CDs.

Probably for the best that books are going away, kids these days tend to turn them into their entire personality and keep alive bad ideas far longer then they have any right to exist.

I agree with the article good code lives on screens, it should be self documenting. If it can't be self-documenting then a tool is the next best thing, then docs, books, If a person has to explain to another person what going on something is very wrong. I also agree that "teaching modes" on chatbots need to be far stricter, I've seen some research in this direction. But it's also on the community to create a software cannon that isn't controlled by some megacorp so your dedication is yours.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#128

Post by casey2 »

jml7c5 wrote: post #22
fartfeatures wrote: post #11

Nobody uses a horse and cart as an every day method of commuting anymore.

It's a bit different than that analogy would suggest. Learning things piecemeal can leave strange gaps in one's knowledge, in my experience. A book is often much quicker.

Almost all programming books are more piecemeal than the docs

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#130

Post by arikrahman »

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.…

It was my first book and introduced me to the No Starch Press aesthetic no other line has managed to replicate.
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