151–160 of 180 posts
Read online (and not in the app), but the copy-editing did not do it any favors, and then how code snippets were formed broke the simple copy/paste (used icons for line breaks that could have been avoidable).
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As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine. I could spend hours just exploring what languages and topics there were I didn't even know existed. Powell's Technical Books used to be an entire separate…
> As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. When I think about this, I get a little bit scared. Imagine books going away, even if it's just the subcategory of technical books. The printed word has been around for a long time. The number of things that have been printed has always gone up. It really bothers me that that's changing. PDFs…
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As an avid reader (and sometimes writer) of technical books, it's sad to see the, perhaps inevitable, decline of the space. I still remember in the early 2000s Barnes and Noble would still have massive shelf space devoted to every technical topic you could imagine. I could spend hours just exploring what languages and topics there were I didn't even know existed. Powell's Technical Books used to be an entire separate…
Weird, I have honestly never walked into a Barnes and Noble and had satisfaction with any of their technical content on the shelf. That pleasure died when we lost Borders. *Edit: spell correct kills me!
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I love pragprog but I think nonfiction books in dead tree form is going away. YEs, I know there are people who will pay for a physical book, just not enough to make for a profitable business. I myself spend around 200-300 usd on books every year. but I haven't bought a physical book in almost a decade. a pdf is perfectly fine. just sell it to me without DRM and have content thats worth the premium over wading through…
I on the other hand can't stand PDFs. They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need. Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping th…
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The shelf life of technology books is shorter than it takes to read them. Most were notebooks of students quickly edited into a learning tool. Oh wow more Python recipes. Another introduction to C++! The worlds moved on from valuing the latest DSL and additions to the Linux kernel. Just a fad marketed at GenX and older Millennials. SaaS is something tech billionaires need to exist. It's not something humanity needs.…
Your map- and communication apps are SaaS.
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Back when I subscribed to O'Reilly I had a bookmark set up to search there with Packt excluded. Otherwise no matter what I searched for the results were clogged up with Packt-slop.
I think this is precisely the Packt strategy though - to always overwhelm the search results, whether its O'reilly, Amazon, etc. They do this by their sheer volume of low quality titles. Everything about that company and their content is complete shit.
> Unfortunately, I cannot read technical books fast and definitely not fast enough to make the subscription be worth $500 per year. Reading is never about being fast at doing it. If you don't want to read a book, read it fast.
Anytime I'm asked for feedback via the O'Reilly website (I manage the business account for my company), the first thing I always say is that the app is unusable. I've tried it on my Amazon Fire Tablet, Ipad, different phones - it doesn't work. The user metrics in O'reilly (and probably most learning apps) has floored in the last 12 months. I see they've launched a new AI platform now. They're definitely going in a di…
Can't you just download pirated copies as a pdf or epub and read them on any device? It feels much more convenient than using a shitty DRM app, and if you have ethical concerns nothing's stopping you from still paying for a subscription while doing that.
Amazon then became my main go-to... then more blog articles and technical posts became prevalent... StackOverflow grew to similar dominance. Now, I buy a handful of books for my Kindle a couple times a year and may or may not get through them. I'm more inclined to just read online docs, search or even look at AI results than read through books. I miss dead tree books, but the space and moving them kinda sucks. Not to mention, that even with glasses the text is a bit hard for me now.
I'm still an avid tech reader, just more blogs and less books... I used to tear through 500-800 pages on a typical weekend. After 3 decades in this career, I'm a bit more inclined to veg out in front of the TV.