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Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

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Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#91

Post by NikolaNovak »

cvwright wrote: post #53
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…

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.

Agreed, Books on specific programming language were indeed tricky.

I found books on architecture, systems, or patterns, were more available. E.g. On relational database optimization principles, or Unix system administration, or graphics algorithms and rendering math, etc :)

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#92

Post by majormajor »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #49
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?

> Surely the desired state isn't that nobody knows how to write code any more right? Shaping up like that in my org. At least one mid-career dev says he no longer looks at code. I still look at code and find that agents work best when I write the foundation and then vibe on top of my hand-written code. Works extremely well because agent picks up my style accurately.

Hopefully your management is trying to answer the following question: is said middle-career dev outproducing their past self, and others who still look at code, with:

1) submitted changes that don't need any more revision than their previous human-written ones when it comes to code review?

2) no increase in bug incidents

3) no slow-down in peer work or future work caused by humans-or-agents having to fight increasingly overly-complicated, poorly-factored, copypasta-style code or god methods? (this might not be evident yet)

(Another question is how well is this person doing their job as a reviewer, making sure to keep the product quality bar high, without looking at code?)

Anyone in an org with coworkers no longer writing code needs to be making sure their managers have a pulse on the long-term health of the product to see who's doing it well (lots of test coverage, shipping only super-high-quality, refined-from-multiple angles stuff) or just being lazy (shipping first drafts that continually add debt to various files and methods).

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#93

Post by atmavatar »

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.

It depends on what kind of reference book you get.

A reference book on a particular language is going to have a pretty short useful lifetime, since any language of significant popularity will evolve relatively quickly.

In contrast, a reference book on general programming knowledge (e.g., design patterns) could very well last a lifetime.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#95

Post by onemoresoop »

infinet wrote: post #70
nritchie wrote: post #31

Not true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover. In fact, I've probably read each page in "Rust for Rustaceans" at least twice to ensure that I understood some of the more subtle points.…

I have a gut feeling that human as a creature learns better when looking at the information from several different angles, both physically and mentally. Been physically I mean looking at the same concept on screen and on hard copy books, perhaps taking notes and mark relevent sentences with a highlighter. Similarly, seeing a concept on physical book and write some short code snippet is viewing the concept from differ…

I learn the same way but there are different people who learn in different ways. Also some people come with some concepts already understood from past experience or education, it’s easier for to pick things up without needing various angles.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#96

Post by brightball »

nritchie wrote: post #31

Not true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover. In fact, I've probably read each page in "Rust for Rustaceans" at least twice to ensure that I understood some of the more subtle points.…

Getting a book is my goto to learn anything new. I taught myself PHP and ended up finding a book 4 years later when I was looking for an answer to something. On the next page was something that would have saved me tons of time so I read the whole book.

Since then I’ve read books on Ruby, Go, Elixir, Docker, K8s and a lot more. By far the best way to get a semi complete understanding of anything without scraping together data from the internet yourself, because you won’t easily know the gaps.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#97

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

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…

Yes, I liked it. When it debuted it was a massive improvement over expertsexchange, who had previously dominated the Google searches with bait and switch previews.

It may not have aged well but to say it was always crap is rewriting history.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#99

Post by DANmode »

Gigachad wrote: post #36
DANmode wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too early to call, but that is a crazy stat. Wow.

Too early to call? It's hit rock bottom. I've never seen a major site die so completely before.

Google Search was looking bleak at one point, recently, based on deltas alone.

Re: Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

#100

Post by wyclif »

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…

I've commented on this development before on HN, so I'm glad to see this post on the front page. From a few months back:

"...the fact of the matter is that kids getting into high tech and programming mostly don't read books anymore. How do I know? Recently I was hanging out with a bunch of high school students who asked me how I learned. I said it was mostly via books and man pages. "Yeah, don't sleep on high quality written material. O'Reilly. Wiley. Addison-Wesley. Manning. MIT. No Starch Press. &c...

"Well. You should have seen the look on their faces. I might as well have morphed into the Steve Buscemi meme "How do you do, fellow kids?" They looked at me like I was a total relic or greybeard and said things like "Nah, nobody reads tech books anymore; I learned Typescript from YouTube videos."

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