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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

I've never owned a single physical programming book and I've been doing this around 10 years. The internet is more than sufficient.

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Often times the best resources for learning something in programming is a book. I don't buy or believe in physical books, but the digital editions are very much worth reading.

It's not about the physicality of a book, it's that guides are typically of lower quality and less in-depth than a book is.

Rarely, you get a "guide" so good it's a book (for JavaScript: Mozilla Developer Network). For many languages and tools, something like this does not exist.

What C++ guide online is going to teach me as well as The C++ Programming Language, 4th Edition? What Rust guide online is going to teach me as well as The Rust Programming Language?

I agree with your view that book is the best resource for learning.

I have read so many tutorials that were just bad, that reinvented the wheel, mixed patterns in MVC, had business rules in javascript without server side validation and so on. Books usually will touch on why something is done a certain way and you can trust an author that is well regarded in the field. I guess it may take a bit more effort.

Have you considered that during those 10 years you might not have learned much?

Not as much as the extremists but a decent amount. 10 years ago being first introduction to programming some time in K-12 to now: besides what you learn in a CS degree, I've made significant contributions to Unity3D games including networking code on the one that's an MMO, wrote emulators, wrote a graphical IDE with a custom assembler for NES games, made some HTML5 games like a recreation of the Windows 95 maze with Three.js, and now in the professional world I've learned a lot about a certain CMS and taken a decent amount of online courses provided at work for professional advancement, such as one on R. I'm personally satisfied with the breadth and depth of what I've learned, especially given I have other hobbies.

Don't need to own them, check your local library. Books delve deeper than blog posts or even series of them, without distraction.

+1 for without distraction

And this how we get “expert beginners”.

Are you accusing me of being an "expert beginner" based on preferring web resources over books?

The parent post quoted these books:

    The Pragmatic Programmer
    Clean Code
    The Clean Coder
    Domain-Driven Design
    Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
    Continuous Delivery

These aren't "programming books" for the most part.

There is a huge difference between "programming" and "software engineering".

The parent post also said those books were boring fluff that didn't tell you anything you didn't learn on your own in the first month of a job. They recommend actual computer science and math instead, which is more the route I took. I'd say ProjectEuler is a good resource for practicing algorithmic optimization and math. I enjoyed the classes in college that went deeper into CS concepts like Language Processing and I did take extra math classes, but I'm not sure what resources I'd recommend on them. Probably some good textbooks available digitally. I'm not opposed to the concept of the format of a book, I'm just saying it's easily possible to be successful in "programming" and "software engineering" without having these books on your shelf, which the parent post said nobody reads anyway.

Yes plenty of people do read them.

And very few people do algorithms and math on their jobs.

You also don't learn most of what the books teach you on your job.

Knowing how to do algorithms and math is rarely what's needed to deliver software.

Yes. scarface74 is trying to tell you that the parent post is wrong. For the record, I'm on scarface74's side of this one. Those books are not soft skills. They're about the difference between being able to code up an algorithm and actual software engineering.

We've got too many people employed as software engineers when all they know is computer science. They cause a lot of problems without even knowing it. When others complain, they respond that their algorithms are perfect - as if that were where the problem was.

I don't need a book to learn Vue but learning React, Rails, Aspdotnet core needs a book.

Timeline of features is usually lost when reading about them online.

A book can present better timeline and overview of what all things are available in a framework.

Online guides were entirely sufficient when I learned Rails and ASP.NET a while ago. There's no special property of dead trees and ink that makes it more suited to delivering information.

May be ebook or .pdf or some online. The point of a book is to dig deeper.

I read pdf sir, never waste a tree when u can!

There are experienced people writing books and people are even paying for them. Surely, they do have smth worth mentioning in a book.

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