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Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

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Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#321

Post by floxy »

graemep wrote: post #300
rustyhancock wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm similar, I think perhaps it's a generational thing which slightly modified the title in a pedantic way. The people who "grew up" with text books still crack new ones and old ones. The current generation turning 18-21 don't. It surprises me because I'm often asked why I knew X or Y odd perhaps esoteric fact or design pattern. Usually it's because I came across it in a book interested in something else. It's that p…

Surely people still use textbooks for formal education? This has to be something that happens later.

Professors putting textbooks in the syllabus and students reading those texts aren't necessarily the same.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#322

Post by baron1405 »

tomwheeler wrote: post #318
baron1405 wrote: post #104

I type this comment flanked by my shelves of computer books. Most I keep for sentimental or historical value. My first edition K&R, the first PostScript Red Book, the volumes of The Art of Computer Programming, and many animal books. In addition to what the author said, what saddens me is that most developers today will not have these milestones of their growth as a software engineer to look back upon. Our history is…

> the volumes of The Art of Computer Programming I'd speculate that the number of people who own these outnumber the people who have actually read them by a pretty wide margin.

True, for me it was a read-on-demand.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#323

Post by BrenBarn »

Scoundreller wrote: post #163
BrenBarn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, to the extent that Reddit is filling the role of StackOverflow it's clearly worse.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#324

Post by mixmastamyk »

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…

Yes. People forget it was a response to abominations such as Yahoo Answers, which quickly devolved into a cesspool of mouthbreathers, haha. Also expert-sexchange/quora which tried-to/often-did hide the answers.

Without its "tough love" Stack would have had a similar trajectory. Maybe a few policies here and there were problematic but overall it was and continues to be a huge benefit to the developer/IT community.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#325

Post by rustyhancock »

graemep wrote: post #300
rustyhancock wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm similar, I think perhaps it's a generational thing which slightly modified the title in a pedantic way. The people who "grew up" with text books still crack new ones and old ones. The current generation turning 18-21 don't. It surprises me because I'm often asked why I knew X or Y odd perhaps esoteric fact or design pattern. Usually it's because I came across it in a book interested in something else. It's that p…

Surely people still use textbooks for formal education? This has to be something that happens later.

This study tracked study resource usage in 2021 and mentions a study in 2006.

In 2006 medical students spent 10.8hours per week studying with textbooks, on 2021 4.2hours.

So under 40% the textbook usage as 2006. That's a fairly precipitous decline and it's pre-LLMs being mainstream. I down chatgpt 4/5 have sent the students back to the library!

It mentions question banks have expanded as have online resources. Also learning style has changed from lecture based to problem based learning.

I can't say this is objectively bad. But that I'm sure it contributes to narrowed knowledge bases.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8651945/

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#326

Post by mejutoco »

anthk wrote: post #270
mejutoco wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this metaphor. Spanish ñ, Catalan or French ç, German ß. Similarly for ł and other Polish letters. It seems strictly speaking the latin alphabet cannot cover many european languages. But mostly we can say latin can express that. You can write "ss" for German and l for Polish, etc, so it can definitely be used. Source: whatssap messages.

Spanish: 'ny' as a digraph. Accented vowels (stress marks) and ü -> 'a 'e 'i 'o 'u and maybe :u.

It seems we agree that the latin alphabet can represent these for Polish, Spanish, etc.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#327

Post by joseda-hg »

tomwheeler wrote: post #317
joseda-hg wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a jab at you (or your book), But I always assumed O'Reilly's per book sales would be significantly larger, like 4 figures at the minimum

Aside from any downward trend attributable to LLMs, technical book sales were always lower than most people would have imagined. I've known a few authors who published with O'Reilly and other major publishers and most told me that they made less than minimum wage in the end. There were other benefits, such as increased name recognition and credibility that let them charge more as consultants, but the direct proceeds…

In general I get that, but O'Reilly has enough prestige/recognition that I assumed they'd be the top outliers, if they don't break the thousands, I assume basically no one does in the field (Barring books for beginners, that have a significantly larger potential buyer pool)

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#328

Post by markus_zhang »

skissane wrote: post #299

My dad asked what to get our 13 year old as a birthday present. So I asked him, and he said Jon Duckett’s JavaScript and JQuery book - which he realises is a bit dated by now (2014), but he wanted it anyway (in part because he already has the other two books in the series), so that’s what he’s got. And sometimes a “dated” book is still valuable. One night recently I was having trouble getting him to go to sleep becau…

For a 13 years old? Wow that’s so amazing. How did you get him interested in Linux and OS stuffs in general? Btw you can probably get him access to the actual systems — there are people offering accounts for those operating systems.

I probably have another OS book that covers slightly different ones — instead of IBM mainframe OS it covers CP/M.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#329

Post by tmaly »

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…

I still enjoy buying paper books and reading them. There is something different about having something physical.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#330

Post by wlonkly »

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…

This reminded me of the Diataxis documentation model.[1] A lot of what's out there now is the "application" side of the model, leaving the "acquisition" side unfulfilled.

[1] https://diataxis.fr/

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