381–390 of 470 posts
Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Tech content is no exception. As the article points out, the corollary is that you have to think for yourself, assessing every piece of content you come across.
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Perhaps part of the problem is that books are hard to search? It may well be a bad habit, but I frequently don't learn new technologies through a concerted effort. Instead, there's just something I want to do, and I google it, and after doing that a bunch I eventually learn a lot.
I feel like that method of discovery is how I learn best, because I learn WHY something is the way it is, and how it's actually used outside of toy examples. Plus, it's just how most people are built to learn. And yes, books not being searchable is basically THE reason I never use programming books.
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This is just flat out false. You're showing your (lack of) age here. The nature of niche languages is people who like them run to the next niche when the next niche springs from the aether. And when their blogs and youtube channnels die, so will they wither on the vine. There has always been higher quality documentation for Python things than most languages, because as a community, Python encourages quality documenta…
Okay old man, show me your age and knowledge: do you know about Oleg Kiselyov and his amazing articles? See here: http://okmij.org/ftp/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_...
The most ubiquitous languages used in the most highly trafficked websites in the world are Javascript (1995), PHP (1995), Python (1990), C++ (1979), and Java (1994).
No, I do not keep up with individuals' blogs and articles. I am very familiar with the O'Reilly books mentioned by one of their authors in another comment in this thread, however. And it's a universally accepted truth at this point that Stackoverflow and blogs are poor replacements for them.
There's a particular brand of young developer where every opinion comes from a blog post, talk or HN comment. They have strong views on many different topics and believe that they're knowledgeable and smarter than the average developer^[1]. The only issue? They don't have actual experience to back this up. Because not only is most tech content bullshit, the small percentage that isn't BS may not apply to their situat…
Being young is hard, no need to judge to harshly, often a rivalrous blogpost-driven discussion can be turned into a cooperative exploration, which is exactly a way for them to gain the experience. Quiet, or at-arms-length, dismissal hurts self-confidence and reinforces this blogpost-driven defense mechanism.
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I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high. I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was aroun…
The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it. If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a month pretty quickly. Every hour saved would pay for itself many times over. The problem is having a wide enough array of content that such a site becomes the single go to. O'Reilly had that catalog, but I think the tech world had gotten much more complicated sin…
So maybe the economics would disincentivize authorship.
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I make a living selling iOS development courses at high prices, so I can tell you that the we didn't lose the paid ecosystem. I can't talk about book publishers like O'Really, and probably the market for books shrank. But I have several competitors that sell self published ebooks. The plethora of free content you find online is not always a good thing for everyone. As the author of the article says, most tech content…
Paid tutorials, especially in video format, usually serve different clientele. There's often 'show me how it's done' instead of 'let me figure this out after reading it' mentality.
Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality…
Nowadays anyone can publish a book on Amazon, digitally and get published. It's reflected a lot in their Kindle bookstore.
Sometimes, having a good barrier to entry, brings out the best and the most dedicated.
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The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it. If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a month pretty quickly. Every hour saved would pay for itself many times over. The problem is having a wide enough array of content that such a site becomes the single go to. O'Reilly had that catalog, but I think the tech world had gotten much more complicated sin…
Spotify’s returns to creators are pitifully small, and since they’re basically a distributor not a publisher, they don’t offer advances on royalties. So maybe the economics would disincentivize authorship.
The "like spotify" was more in reference to pay once, get everything imaginable.
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I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high. I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was aroun…
I think it’s around 20/month now for O’Reilly learning (the new name for safari books). I’ve had it for around 5 years now, and I don’t ever recall having a limit on number of items. I feel like they have actually got better, with some really good video courses included as well. I’m just completing the second of two courses which are available elsewhere for $99 each, so I’ve almost paid for the year. I really like th…