Don’t worry, once LLMs poison the well enough by disincentivizing sharing content online, technical books will thrive again.
Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
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Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#52Nobody uses a horse and cart as an every day method of commuting anymore.
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.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#53Beyond 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…
Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare.
Younger me really enjoyed some of the game programming books by Andre Lamothe.
Most “Learn Language X” books were terrible with over focus on syntax and very little thought into organization.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#54> 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 was just thinking to my self the other day how it's nice I don't need to stop what I'm doing to make a question that's answerable by someone else. Ai can answer my question without me spending time recreating the problem and stripping out all of the irrelevant context
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#55> 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...
Interesting looking at the data, the questions always seemed to peek in March. Anyone have insight into that?
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#56> 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…
StackOverflow was great when I was a very junior dev working on JavaScript apps. Anytime I ran into a roadblock, there was often a relevant post there to help me. As I become more competent though, I realized that reading the documentation directly was usually a much better way to get answers to my questions, and I stopped visiting.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#57 > You already know why, more or less. ChatGPT has over 900 million monthly active users. GitHub Copilot has 4.7 million paying subscribers as of January 2026, up roughly 75% in a year. You can’t imagine writing software without Claude Code anymore.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#58> They were thick, they cost about $50, and they had titles like “Learning React” and “HTTP: The Definitive Guide”.
The most effective way to make money from open soruce was (for a time at least) to be Tim O'Reilly, Amazon, or Google.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too early to call? It's hit rock bottom. I've never seen a major site die so completely before.
MySpace comes to mind. Slashdot maybe.
Both before my time. These days it seems like every site is able to withstand pretty much every controversy. Facebook should have died about 5 times by now but the company is as strong as ever.
Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore
#60I used to read a book or two when diving into a new language. But I think the last time I did that was in 2017 when I learned Swift. That was supplemented with a lot of Stackoverflow.
I think the next deep dive was in 2022, when I learned Go. But that was completely from online sources.