Do you even bother with tech books anymore?
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Serious question. I get the "general" nature of development things, but most of the stuff I've seen in the last few years - meh. It's all fluff. Looking at my solid oak bookcase, I have about 40 books of various types on the shelves. In general, I have found the bookcase, my desk (lawyer sized solid oak), and credenza to be horizontal collection devices (think about that). About 1/3 of the books are cooking books - yes I'm getting tired of the tech, I'm seriously done with the tech BS. You youngsters are so screwed. Going to donate them to the local high school... Meanwhile, I'm just amazed at how us techies have moved on. I have not seen decent documentation since my openVMS days - and I KNEW where to find stuff in the large gray wall. Further, it was actually useful. Unlike the reprocessed garbage from MS. The last good book I read about MS was pure code related, but the name escapes me. Pretty sure MS has an idiot AI generating "technical" doc for their products.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Heck I still print out old books (so much ink the office laser printer). Most of the documentation for the C libraries in RiscOS are in PDFs but I can't deal with looking at them constantly from my iPad or the screen, so I print them out, even if it's 600 pages long. Did the same with the SDL 1.2 tutorial (I know I can get it from amazon but they no longer send it with the CD, so I might as well just print the PDF)
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It depends... With the advent of StackOverflow and sites like this, coupled with the decreasing quality of mainstream tech books, I found them to be a waste of money. But... When it comes to more narrow topics e.g. writing kernel drivers or data pipelining, that's where the tech books shine, if you can find one on the narrow subject you seek. Gone are the days of tech books for the sake of the craft, such as Andrew Schulman's Undocumented Windows and its ilk. How I miss those days... Also, I used to love going to tech bookstores to browse books. Not only mainstream store like B&N and Borders, but more focused stores like the McGraw Hill bookstore on 6th Avenue in Manhattan. Sigh...
Stacy Dudovitz wrote:
With the advent of StackOverflow
With the advent of Stack Overflow, I went back to printed books. I do not like to be yelled at, 9 out of 10 times, because I phrased the question incorrectly. Or, my question was answered six years ago, so why do I have to ask it again? Or, ... I don't enjoy being treated as a silly fool, no matter how I phrase my question. SO is the most unfriendly web site I have ever accessed. At least books don't yell at me. Sometimes, a Google search leads me to some useful information at SO, but I never, ever any more ask questions there.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Serious question. I get the "general" nature of development things, but most of the stuff I've seen in the last few years - meh. It's all fluff. Looking at my solid oak bookcase, I have about 40 books of various types on the shelves. In general, I have found the bookcase, my desk (lawyer sized solid oak), and credenza to be horizontal collection devices (think about that). About 1/3 of the books are cooking books - yes I'm getting tired of the tech, I'm seriously done with the tech BS. You youngsters are so screwed. Going to donate them to the local high school... Meanwhile, I'm just amazed at how us techies have moved on. I have not seen decent documentation since my openVMS days - and I KNEW where to find stuff in the large gray wall. Further, it was actually useful. Unlike the reprocessed garbage from MS. The last good book I read about MS was pure code related, but the name escapes me. Pretty sure MS has an idiot AI generating "technical" doc for their products.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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Serious question. I get the "general" nature of development things, but most of the stuff I've seen in the last few years - meh. It's all fluff. Looking at my solid oak bookcase, I have about 40 books of various types on the shelves. In general, I have found the bookcase, my desk (lawyer sized solid oak), and credenza to be horizontal collection devices (think about that). About 1/3 of the books are cooking books - yes I'm getting tired of the tech, I'm seriously done with the tech BS. You youngsters are so screwed. Going to donate them to the local high school... Meanwhile, I'm just amazed at how us techies have moved on. I have not seen decent documentation since my openVMS days - and I KNEW where to find stuff in the large gray wall. Further, it was actually useful. Unlike the reprocessed garbage from MS. The last good book I read about MS was pure code related, but the name escapes me. Pretty sure MS has an idiot AI generating "technical" doc for their products.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
In just the last couple of months, I have spent several hundred dollars on tech books. I probably spend several thousand yearly -- and have done so for the last half century. I own around 20,000 books -- not all tech (around 1/3 to 1/2 were my late wife's books). Unfortunately, most are currently in storage. Just on the bookcases near me, there are probably between 600 and 1000 tech books. These are not manuals, technical documentation, cooking books, and very little has anything to do with Microsoft. What you find on the internet is typically low level, and random stuff someone felt like putting up. But, especially for tech, there is a huge amount that still only in books -- and that is likely to be true for a very long time. Good luck on donating books. I have more than the local public library. There is no way in hell that they would accept my books if I died. They would try to sell some, most of the rest would be donated somewhere like Habitats for Humanity, who in turn would eventually burn them. Fortunately, the tech books probably could be donated to a local public university. They might even take some of the fiction. I suspect cooking books are going to be homeless.
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Yes. Yes I do. In fact, I just bought several books on x86 Assembler, AAarch64 Assembler, Rust, and Python. I prefer having paper in front of me as well as online resources. I also have kept all of my EE books (I specialized in communications systems in the microwave region) and my original notes from college (converted to searchable PDF) which have been more valuable in a lot of cases than online documentation. That's just me though, I'm pretty old school paper and pencil when it comes to engineering stuff. I learn better that way.
-Sean ---- Fire Nuts
Converting your college notes to pdf is a pretty cool move. I hauled a couple of boxes around for a long time containing my college notes and texts. After the first couple of years, I never referred to them again.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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Converting your college notes to pdf is a pretty cool move. I hauled a couple of boxes around for a long time containing my college notes and texts. After the first couple of years, I never referred to them again.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
One of my friend really wanted to read one (fiction) book, and was happy when I told him that I had got a copy that he could borrow. When he realized that I was talking about a physical, printed copy, my offer was turned down: He stopped reading printed books years ago. If I could scan the book for him, so he could read it on his laptop, he was interested, but please: No paper stuff! He would rather continue his search for an electronic copy. I did not scan my copy for him. And I never later asked if he wanted to borrow any of my books, that be physical or digital.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Books are for old people. I used books at the start of my career, about fifteen years ago. But now I rarely need to know 400 pages of information, so I just google for the particular thing I want to know, or ask ChatGPT. Much easier than searching through books, which probably don't have that specific answer anyway. If there's something new I must learn, online tutorials have gotten much better too.
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
The problem with this approach is that information online disappears. I'm fighting a battle with Microsoft at the moment, trying to track information down. Since everyone is having orgasms over chat this and that and AI, I think that is where the info is moving. I'll have to suck it up and figure it out.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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The problem with this approach is that information online disappears. I'm fighting a battle with Microsoft at the moment, trying to track information down. Since everyone is having orgasms over chat this and that and AI, I think that is where the info is moving. I'll have to suck it up and figure it out.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I recently had the issue of working on an old Angular 1 application (not even that old, 2016 or something). Obviously, searching for Angular, even with the addition of "1" or "JS", gets you results for Angular 2+, which is completely different. I managed, but just barely. Don't know if I would've found the answers in a book though (but an Angular 1 book might've helped). Angular seems kind of an odd one out though. Other than that I'm more often ahead of the online articles ;)
Best, Sander Azure DevOps Succinctly (free eBook) Azure Serverless Succinctly (free eBook) Migrating Apps to the Cloud with Azure arrgh.js - Bringing LINQ to JavaScript
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I recently purchased Code by Charles Petzold, but that is only for personal amusement. The last programming book I actually got any use out of was the manual for Turbo Pascal - now that was a good manual. For image processing the book Machine Vision Algorithms and Application by Carsten Steger, Markus Ulrich and Christian Weidemann was very useful when I was starting out. A little dated now in the 3D world, but still worth a read.
I was trying to remember the name of one of my favorite books - Code Complete by Petzold McConnell. Just some good common sense coding information. lol, mixing up my old time writers. Thanks for the reminder.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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Gave up on them years ago. As for actual documentation, Microsoft's is good compared to Java and Android.
Not sure about Microsoft. Every time I look up a subject, they have segmented it so badly that each little portion is nigh useless. So I click and I click. Best documentation I have ever had to use was from Digital Equipment back in their haydays.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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Converting your college notes to pdf is a pretty cool move. I hauled a couple of boxes around for a long time containing my college notes and texts. After the first couple of years, I never referred to them again.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Sometimes. Just sometimes, I have a good idea. I hit them up when I remember I used to know how to do something :laugh: . Mostly though, the notes I have about how I figured something out are the most useful. Typical engineering notebook stuff.
-Sean ---- Fire Nuts
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One of my friend really wanted to read one (fiction) book, and was happy when I told him that I had got a copy that he could borrow. When he realized that I was talking about a physical, printed copy, my offer was turned down: He stopped reading printed books years ago. If I could scan the book for him, so he could read it on his laptop, he was interested, but please: No paper stuff! He would rather continue his search for an electronic copy. I did not scan my copy for him. And I never later asked if he wanted to borrow any of my books, that be physical or digital.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
