did they ever?
Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
151–160 of 367 posts
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#152People still use programming books, they just don't purchase new retail books as often. Books have become magnitudes cheaper for publishers to produce but the books didn't get cheaper for consumers. I went to O'Reilly's site, clicked on the first book that popped up and it costs $67.99 for a digitally printed paperback book:
https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/345913182/ai-engineering/c...
Take a guess why so many younger devs will opt to pirate a PDF rather than purchase retail programming books. Publishers are pricing themselves out of the market.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#153Nobody uses a horse and cart as an every day method of commuting anymore.
There are quite a few people who do exactly that, including in modern Western countries.
Oddly enough I do a little bit of computer consulting for one such person.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Horse and cart might be antiquated and slow, but my god are they so much cheaper and more reliable than the modern car. Many parts of the world still rely on horse and cart today, even modern societies.
You can't just buy a horse and park it in a garage. You need to exercise it, give it vet care, shoes, feed it, deal with poop, etc. Or, pay someone to do that. Unless you live in a place with dirt roads, or really love horses, I think a beater Toyota would win in terms of time and cost.
Well, you can't really just buy a beater car and park it in a garage. You have to perform maintenance on it, and the worst thing for a car is to just sit a long time.
A horse has the unique feature that it can create more horses, which is something a car doesn't do. Horses are also unique in being an appreciating asset, which cars are most definitely not.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#155imo books for programming language should be roughly a guide to docs, with better context collocation and more elaborate examples, otherwise it would be really painful to use language
you can't pick up c++ from the docs and the language itself is a monstrosity, and for that you must have book explaining why do you have 30 types of pointers, golang in the meantime have excellent official guide, and you don't really need any book
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#156The decline of programming books removed a constraint on programming language complexity. At one point, the basic set of books for Java was six volumes. That's when language books broke down from sheer complexity. The combination of Google search and Stack Overflow allowed programming to become more complex than anyone could keep in their head. C++ bloated to the point that people who used to be C++ language lawyers…
When we go back to early Java, the death of books just came from better IDEs, not even stack overflow (which wasn't there) or Google search (which had little to find). Something like IntelliJ made the very large reference section irrelevant, as you got to see source and Javadocs right there. Intellisense also found most of what you needed blindly. That was 90% of those 6 java books. You'd still see a need for specifics good explanations like, say, Java concurrency in practice for all the original low level primitives. Maybe some madman that could explain the initial implementation of the Calendar classes.
Either way, one needed far smaller books the moment all of that came in, especially because in Java, library code is very readable. Compare that to looking inside a C++ standard library: It's not impossible, but it's of a completely different nature of normal C++ we might write for a business.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#157Reading a well written programming book will put you ahead of 99% of other programmers using that language. Most programmers learn some subset of a language to get things working, and never learn more than that.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#158I 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.
would you mind sharing the names of the books you bought?
https://teachyourselfcs.com/ is an excellent list
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#159[dead]
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#160With a programming book, you invested time to thoroughly learn something new. The language/tool and its associated way of thinking were now part of your toolbox. You were simply a better programmer going forward.
With AI that toolbox doesn’t grow. You don’t become better, everything from now on will be wrangled into shape with the frozen set of skills you have at this point.
For some people this is fine. For me the endless learning and sharpening of the blade is one of this most appealing parts of programming, so I hate this.