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Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

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Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#161

Post by rramadass »

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…

> the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation.

> 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

> the tutoring of LLM, but to this day as a complement to a guided book

> I grab a book, and then use LLM to supplement my reading

My sentiments exactly!

People forget that mere data/information without a proper encompassing mental model/framework into which that information slots in to complete the big picture is what education and knowledge are all about. You must see the forest and not just the trees.

This is particularly relevant to CS since there are so many interlinked concepts involved that you can get overwhelmed and drown in the details without understanding anything. Edsger Dijkstra explicitly pointed this out in his EWD340: The Humble Programmer - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd03xx/EWD340.PDF

If you haven't built up a systematic and holistic mental model then you have not learnt anything. Top-down design and Bottom-up implementation both have to meet for the system to come together.

This is the main reason you need a good teacher or a good book as a stand-in for the teacher.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#162

Post by smelendez »

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.

Sometimes I'll be in a large used bookstore, like the kind of cavernous ones you find in places with cheap real estate, or at a charity sale and there will be a book with a title like "Learning J2SE 1.4" or "XHTML for Dummies" that is just utterly and completely useless.

I wonder if these books will eventually be interesting, the way old ham radio or slide rule manuals can be, or if they're just forever doomed to irrelevance.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#163

Post by Scoundreller »

BrenBarn wrote: post #76
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…

I thought StackOverflow was pretty great. This is an unpopular opinion but I think a lot of the questions that were closed really deserved to be closed. Otherwise it would have been a firehose of the same basic questions over and over again. For every person who posted a question and got mad that it was closed, there were probably 100 people who googled something and found a useful StackOverflow answer that was relev…

> Otherwise it would have been a firehose of the same basic questions over and over again.

You’ve just described a large chunk of Reddit.

Their poor internal search doesn’t help.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#164

Post by isityettime »

jimmaswell wrote: post #138

I tried to introduce a partner to programming with an introductory Python book one year ago. It was brand new on the shelf in the impulse purchase area at Micro Center. It looked nice on the outside and decently vetted at a glance of the intro and a page or two, I trusted Micro Center (undeserved in retrospect), and I was in a bit of a rush. I gave it to my partner to try out on their own and they started having trou…

I did something similar with my partner, though I didn't look at a shelf in a physical store. We ended up going with How to Design Programs. There were some small terminological things that I helped clarify. (I can't remember what they were.) But overall, I was blown away by how much she was able to just pick it up and run with it. She used just the book and a little bit of help from very cheap and basic LLMs (not for writing code, just for answering questions) did really well, until life got too busy for her to put more time in.

Overall I think it's a really good book for this kind of thing: https://htdp.org/

> Moral is, books are just as easy to strike out on as a bad online resource. Honestly, I feel like Googling "x language tutorial" is probably going to get you the best results much more easily than picking something off the book shelf - if I can't vet a book reliably, and I already know the damn language inside and out, what hope does a newcomer have?

I don't think language tutorials or "Learn $LANGUAGE" are good targets for introducing people to programming. That's true whether it's a book or a blog post or a YouTube tutorial. You want to teach computational thinking per se before focusing on a particular language. Something like HtDP or _The Little Schemer_ or _Logic, Proof, and Computation_.

Even if you want to dive in with practical skills before developing a foundation, you still don't really want books with targets as broad as "Learn $LANGUAGE". You want something like the _Learn Enough ... to be Dangerous_ series, probably starting with the entry on Command Line and then moving on to the entry of a target language (JavaScript, Ruby, Python) in the same series. Then you can move on to a book that tries to teach more or less a whole language, or a programming paradigm through the lens of a particular language.

If your goal is to learn programming, it doesn't matter that much if the programming language is obscure or the toolchain is out of date. But if your goal is to learn some language to work with peers in it at work or something like that, then yeah, you gotta check the publication date.

For a lot of us, maybe our first programming book or class was presented as a "Python course" or a "Java course" or whatever, but that doesn't really represent the goals of a first encounter with programming no matter what your strategy is.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#165

Post by Scoundreller »

natebc wrote: post #15
eclipxe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how to operate a punch card?

Yes. But Python isn't punch cards behind the scenes so it's not the same thing at all. Besides. You're not asking to produce punch cards to jam into the PDP.

someone needs to try this

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#166

Post by knivets »

Stack Overflow provides marginal value when there are LLMs. Great technical books on the other hand still provide tremendous value and complement LLMs in a learning process: a book provides a fact checked, curated set of topics with clear start and finish (a structure) and LLMs help with any blockers or missing context that readers will encounter.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#167

Post by hcs »

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 liked it, still find good answers, and it was gratifying to provide answers when I could.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#169

Post by arm32 »

jonbodner wrote: post #143

I'm the author of O'Reilly's "Learning Go". Here are the last 13 months of paperback book sales: - Mar 2026: 124 - Feb 2026: 140 - Jan 2026: 157 - Dec 2025: 306 - Nov 2025: 484 - Oct 2025: 218 - Sep 2025: 176 - Aug 2025: 136 - Jul 2025: 317 - Jun 2025: 230 - May 2025: 237 - Apr 2025: 165 - Mar 2025: 367 Sales are certainly down, but it has gone up and down in the past. Since the 1st edition came out in 2021, it has s…

How do you feel about these LLMs potential piracy of your book?

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#170

Post by mook »

eclipxe wrote: post #9
natebc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Junior devs should still read to learn how to write the code. Surely the desired state isn't that nobody knows how to write code any more right?

Do you know how to operate a punch card?

I've never programmed before good compilers existed, but I still know some assembly. For what I currently do it's used rarely, but it's still quite valuable on occasion. I don't see any reason LLM-assisted programming wouldn't be like that; for sure the various C compilers sure seem like they're trying just as hard to produce results you don't want.
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