Ask HN: Do you still buy/read technical books? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you still buy/read technical books?

10 pointsgcatalfamo16 comments

If you decide to learn new skills (e.g python) or about a subject (e.g. ML) do you still rely on technical books for it?

I find myself looking more and more for alternative sources, but it could be just me, not finding a page of code written in a book all that useful.

Note: this is not about the quality of the content, but about the appropriateness of the medium nowadays.

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Books are often the only way to get a really good big picture overview of a subject, because of their scale and editorial process.

* Blog posts tend to be too short, so you only get some details or a really vague outline. A book can do both big picture and relevant details.

* Documentation is usually written by someone who knows the system too well, so too often it leaves out a lot of things that the author thinks are obvious but aren't obvious to readers.

Yes, I still occasionally buy tech books, but only for kicking off learning a new skill. I can read a book in an evening and get the big picture of how things work as well as the underlying philosophy of how the small pieces work. Hopefully I've also gotten at least one person's view of the best practices for that tech.

After that I try to build something. When I'm done with the first play project I rarely return to the book.

For theory, absolutely.

Its still hard to beat the Dragon books for compiler theory, and SICP, Lisp In Small Pieces and others are still some of the best for PLT.

New skills tends to be different, because the technology is new, theoretical underpinnings haven't been researched well enough to be expanded out into a book.

I'd never get a book on jQuery, because I don't need the theoretical underpinning, just the documentation. A basic understanding of the implementation is enough.

However, I would pick up a book on Dot, the Typed Calculus being explored with Scala in the Dotty compiler. Because I'd be learning the mathematics of type safety, and using types to more effeciently generate machine code. However, learning to use Scala would be incidental to that experience.

I use technical books as a medium much different than a quickstart or tutorial for a library / framework / etc.

Last year I bought a Safari Books Online Subscription [1]. It's something like ~$400 but usually goes half price on Black Friday. The core is virtually every O'Reilly book and many from other technical publishers too.

I've bought a couple technical eBooks or paperbacks this year, but for the most part this subscription has replaced that. It's also nice to not accumulate physical clutter for when 2+ years from now that book about hot JavaScript frameworks today will be ancient.

[1]: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/

Books are most useful for matters that don't change very much, which would probably include most academic subjects. Programming language books are good when they're more general in nature (e.g. John Resig's JS book) but are less useful when learning, say, a specific library. In the latter case, online materials seem to be a better guide.

Not as often but I still buy technical books. Last book I bought was, Head First Android.

I enjoy reading books but most technical books I skim through in a couple of days. However, that gives me enough big picture ideas that when I am actually working on a problem, I know what keywords to type in Google.

I feel like a lot of people don't take the Head First series seriously, but honestly I'm a fan.

Sure they are pretty light and big picture but I've come to realize I enjoy building that foundation and figuring out the details myself rather than having an exhaustive tome tell me everything.

I rely on technical books on certain subjects. For instance, I would get a technical book on compiler design patterns because those are pretty timeless. On the other hand, I have stopped buying books that are new programming language specific because the languages tend to change and make the book obsolete. I've experienced this with a RoR/Ruby book I bought that wouldn't even work with the newest version of RoR at the time. The book was useless.

I still read tech books but not in paper since last summer when I signed up to Safari Books Online.

I usually start building new skills with MOOCs, which also help me discover books that will help me later as a reference after the course ends. In this case I prefer paper books, not online ones.

I buy them in PDF form and read them when I do cardio at the gym.

Tried this once and my eyes can't handle trying to read while moving. Maybe it's the astigmatism.

I find the recumbent bicycle is the steadiest way to do reading and cardio at the same time.

All the time. Not particularly for a specific technology, especially in fast-moving domains like web dev, but for more broad practice and theory, the concepts are more timeless. Think Code Complete, or The Art of Unit Testing, or Working Effectively with Legacy Code, or Peopleware.

I'm also a fan of the Syncfusion Succinctly series[1]. They are short, quick overviews of a particular tech, that you can pretty easily go through in a evening and make a good jumping off point for digging deeper.

[1] https://www.syncfusion.com/resources/techportal/ebooks

That link is actually rather interesting I'll have a look at it...although, I suspect you wouldn't use them to specialize on a given topic.

I can only upvote once, but if i could i would twice. Once for the content in that link, and once for your name.

Two more similar ones that come to mind are The Pragmatic Programmer [1] and Pragmatic Thinking and Learning [2].

[1]: https://pragprog.com/book/tpp/the-pragmatic-programmer

[2]: https://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learn...

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