Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

I bought a book on C++20 last year when we started a project on it and I read it.

I don't think programming books are going anywhere, because they still contain a concise directory full of information on different languages or frameworks. If I try to learn a language piecemeal through chatgpt or blogs I risk missing important details or platform-specific knowledge. I'd believe books on vim are going away but books on languages or other job-essential tools have a use in the market and I can't imagine they'll go away.

This corporate messaging of "just use AI, cut as many corners as possible, only retain the essential people and force them to sling slop 7 days a week" is unsustainable.

It's wrong for so many reasons. It disrupts talent pipelines. The staff+ people probably don't want to work twice as hard to cover the cut headcount. In general, people prefer to work on systems that are well architected and not some slop that got vibe coded up in a weekend.

They (corporate upper management) could've just done nothing and the end result would've been better than whatever the fuck is happening right now

Disregarding the issue of AI for a moment, I don’t really think books were ever the ideal way to learn programming.

It’s so obviously better to learn programming in a web based medium. Not just for tutorials or code-running environments, but also for having up-to-date manuals and references for tooling as new releases come out.

Or, if you don’t like that, e-books are again vastly superior with the ability to search easily without flipping through indexes, copy/select text, etc.

Books become out of date so fast, and you live in a hell of manual transcription, which is not actually that helpful for learning despite being highly manual. I also remember dealing with typos and mistakes that were hard to fix as a new learner. Let’s hope someone sent a letter to the author and that the book sold well enough to get a second edition, which I’d then have to buy…but by then it was too late, I’d have moved on.

There was a huge bookshelf because there was no better option. Just like Blockbuster video, something far better came around.

I still maintain an O'Reilly.com subscription, because it's good to read aan edited book on a topic, and the Google search has just gone to seed.

I do it a lot, now with the time saved by coding agents, I do it even more.

I do, actually. Trying to find good material to read for Odin programming language. Most books, are just hard to follow, not newbie-friendly, always gushing with bloat, with things that make the book fatter, making it easier to up the price. Student's usually end up paying the price :(

Sol,

Off-Topic: If I suspect that somebody in a company, or message board is tampering with a user's account, when they are not supposed to, say by blocking their ability to login, would legal action against the company in question be justified on the part of the user?

My career kicked into high gear some time around 2008. I saw somewhere online where a publisher was seeking a volunteer book reviewer / junior editor.

I volunteered, did the best job I could, and posted an honest review via blog. I got more review requests, and a few other publishers contacted me for the same.

I didn’t really master much, because I didn’t put hands on keyboard for a lot of it. But I got a good view of the technical landscape, and I accumulated a nice paperback library.

Before too long, the free books became free ebooks and some of my contacts needed renewing as natural career progression took place. I let my ‘hobby’ die off as I dug deeper in the topics that interested me.

So that era passed. I still have several books with my name in the credits, sort of a souvenir set from the time.

did they ever?

There are books about languages, and then there are books about timeless truths. The former? Toilet paper. The latter? Treasures. Worth reading:

- Okasaki, Purely Functional Data Structures https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/okasaki.pdf

- The Garbage Collection Handbook https://gchandbook.org/

- The Dragon Book - https://faculty.sist.shanghaitech.edu.cn/faculty/songfu/cav/... (yes, it's old, but I still like the end-to-end, all-in-one intro)

- Windows Internals - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/resources/win...

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf

- Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/philbe/book/

- Crafting Interpreters - https://craftinginterpreters.com/

- What Every Programmer Needs to Know About Memory - https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf (the best thing Ulrich Drepper ever did)

- An Introduction to Modern Cryptography - https://eclass.uniwa.gr/modules/document/file.php/CSCYB105/R...

A good programming book gets better with age. If it's really about ideas and uses this or that technology for exposition, so much the better: the more remote in time the grammar of the examples, the more you can focus on the ideas. SICP being in Scheme is an advantage because you don't know Scheme yet; Windows Internals being about Windows teaches you generally good lessons in OS design by forcing you to contemplate a system alien to the Unix you probably know better.

It's shocking how many of these seminal books are available for free and how few people read them. Yes, yes, you can get the same information from an LLM, but an LLM won't give you the guided tour through the whole rugged ideas-space and show you a reasonable peak. Order, emphasis, and expository style build intuition, so books (especially old ones) are worth reading.

Books are more of a unix thing no? I know microsoft had is kernel series but most people used MSDN CDs.

Probably for the best that books are going away, kids these days tend to turn them into their entire personality and keep alive bad ideas far longer then they have any right to exist.

I agree with the article good code lives on screens, it should be self documenting. If it can't be self-documenting then a tool is the next best thing, then docs, books, If a person has to explain to another person what going on something is very wrong. I also agree that "teaching modes" on chatbots need to be far stricter, I've seen some research in this direction. But it's also on the community to create a software cannon that isn't controlled by some megacorp so your dedication is yours.

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Nobody uses a horse and cart as an every day method of commuting anymore.