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Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

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Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#241

Post by rramadass »

rramadass wrote: post #161
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 da…

Corrigendum;

> 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.

should be,

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

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#242

Post by IsTom »

klausa wrote: post #211
brnt wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. C++ isn't a language, it's a script. Like Latin, it can be used to express English, Polish and Indonesian.

Latin can't be used to express Polish; at least not without extra letters, at which point I think it ceases to be "just" Latin script? But maybe that was also your point.

> at which point I think it ceases to be "just" Latin script?

I draw my line at 'U'.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#243

Post by pmontra »

I never bought a programming book in all of my professional career, since the 90s. The only ones I did buy were the K&R C book and the Pascal book at university. They were mandatory readings and basically the only way to learn those languages. Perl? Man pages and online. Tcl? Same thing. When I started working, my company had the whole series of the X11 books (my university too) and we had the Java books. We did use them but Javadocs on the web started to be faster to use than books. Then every reference on the web has been more up to date than any book. Javascript, Ruby, Python, PHP, Elixir, Erlang all of them online. I'm sure that I'm forgetting a bunch of other languages. Blogs are about as good as books about patterns, ideas, best practices etc. I just didn't see the point of buying paper when I could read the same things on a screen for free.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#244

Post by refactor_master »

I've found programming books good at what the internet isn't always: a cohesive story/presentation meant for a broad audience. I've enjoyed reading some more style-oriented books, largely ignoring beyond the gist. Learning about dependency injection and decoupled architecture, but for Python, completely changed how I viewed the language.

I also once read a book on MS SQL Sever 200x, which I don't remember much of, and I don't think it was terribly useful anyway. If I wanted to know the size of a datatype I'd Google it.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#245

Post by fghorow »

merlincorey wrote: post #32
eclipxe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how to operate a punch card?

Yes, and IBM has current documentation if you need to that has been updated in 2026: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/3.2.0?topic=considerations-u... It's generally and simply an encoding of what amounts to binary machine code which you translate via assembly code acting as a deterministic compiler from assembly to machine code if you are doing it manually. LLMs aren't a deterministic process and human languages aren'…

O.M.G.

I last used a card punch in circa 1980 or thereabouts...

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#246

Post by gchamonlive »

sevenzero wrote: post #190
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…

>which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... I wonder how they'd think about it if they had created something (meaningful) that was subjected to this. I love Go and learned it a lot in the past 2 years but ultimately put it down in favor of more "batteries included" solutions as I don't trust myself enough as a d…

I have a different impression, that the folks here are divided in this issue, with a half being AI maximalists saying it's a necessary evil while the other half condemning such practices, maybe not as much as to protect copyright per se, but because there are two different measures here. While teenagers get ridiculous fines for sharing MP3, big corp gets the free pass for stealing data on a industrial scale.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#247

Post by Intermernet »

pmontra wrote: post #243

I never bought a programming book in all of my professional career, since the 90s. The only ones I did buy were the K&R C book and the Pascal book at university. They were mandatory readings and basically the only way to learn those languages. Perl? Man pages and online. Tcl? Same thing. When I started working, my company had the whole series of the X11 books (my university too) and we had the Java books. We did use…

I regularly take my copy of one of the volumes of Knuth's TAOCP off the shelf.

The stuff in those books will never get old, and I often find myself searching for some algorithm or concept that I know I've skimmed over in the past, but no web-searches or LLMs can give me an answer on.

I think it may be due to the lack of open, digital copies of TAOCP available for pillage, as well as the fact that the books don't target a particular language.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#248

Post by GrinningFool »

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…

"considered and mindful order of presentation" -- along these lines my favorite programming book is the Commodore 64 User's Guide, coupled with the reference. I was quite young and found the programming section very approachable. It build on itself in logical layers, and I felt like I had a companion to guide me through the process of learning and understanding. IIRC, I read it like a novel a couple-few times in the process.

https://archive.org/details/commodore-64-user-guide/

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#249

Post by sevenzero »

gchamonlive wrote: post #246
sevenzero wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... I wonder how they'd think about it if they had created something (meaningful) that was subjected to this. I love Go and learned it a lot in the past 2 years but ultimately put it down in favor of more "batteries included" solutions as I don't trust myself enough as a d…

I have a different impression, that the folks here are divided in this issue, with a half being AI maximalists saying it's a necessary evil while the other half condemning such practices, maybe not as much as to protect copyright per se, but because there are two different measures here. While teenagers get ridiculous fines for sharing MP3, big corp gets the free pass for stealing data on a industrial scale.

If AI was public domain and free for everyone, I would have less issues with it (not saying no issues). But yeah, the only people actually benefiting from this are big tech corps who actively destroy society since over a decade now.

The argument about the ability to self host doesn't really make sense to me given that most of society can not even afford RAM at the moment. So all these big tech frontier models should be public domain.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#250

Post by dspillett »

sevenzero wrote: post #190
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…

>which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all... I wonder how they'd think about it if they had created something (meaningful) that was subjected to this. I love Go and learned it a lot in the past 2 years but ultimately put it down in favor of more "batteries included" solutions as I don't trust myself enough as a d…

> > which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so

> Funnily enough, people on HN often do not consider this an issue, like at all...

That is far from true - opinion is quite divided, perhaps even close to 50/50. It sometimes seems that the opinion is skewed massively towards the positive because there are a lot more “look what I did with GenAI” stories because “yeah, I'm not doing that because… here's what I did the old way” doesn't catch interest in the same manner.

This is one of the (several) reasons I'm doing my level best to avoid using the tools - I don't want to pay in to the companies that have run ripshod over everyone's work because they can¹. This is a rather risky position to take in a company where the up-aboves have all but said “get with AI or get left behind”, but quite frankly at the moment “redundancy” isn't a scary word for me².

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[1] Take from a few (i.e. download a couple of TV shows) and it is piracy making you liable for huge fines or even prison time, take from practically everyone (hoover up all their published writing irrespective of licence, gum up their servers with your badly written, or well written but deliberately badly behaved, scraper, etc…) and that is perfectly valid for training purposes.

[2] I appreciate that for many this is not the case, and because of economic pressures they might have to compromise on their feelings if they have the same opinions as I do on GenAI.

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