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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

My solution for this problem: 1) stop trying to learn from random blogs, get a book. Books are still out there and you can learn just as good from them now as 20 years ago.

2) Get a subset of blogs to follow and stick to it. If you want to search in specific sites google has "site:" operator, you can search on specific sites.

3) by following 1 and 2 you can easily stop visiting shitty blogs made only for SEO, when they won't see any traffic they will fold because they will see no one is caring about what they write.

I am in process of implementing that. Got some books from humble bundle in topic that I am interested in, so no browsing crap until I get through those.

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The main reason books are better is because they are harder to write and produce. The person making the book actually has to invest a lot of their time in making it happen, unlike a blog post.

I've seen lots of articles on hacker news (and other places) that is "PART 1 of..." which does the introduction to what they plan on teaching, and then it just dies right there in the land of "PART 1's"

With a book, if you stop at part 1, no one is going to publish your book.

Another thing about books/web, is books go MUCH deeper into topics. It seems like 99% of the content on the web is "INTRO to xyz" but never "Advanced xyz"

Books are also broken into logical section so you have a learning path you can progress through; not just random content that you are to piece together yourself.

So, yes, very good advice; if you want to learn something, read the book.

blog posts are more just advertisements for buying an actual book.

Unfortunately today a lot of the good content is hosted on the same domains as the terrible content. This is one of the many great downsides to content centralization.

If I read a really great piece of tech content it's not going to help me to use that domain in a site: query later when it's so often going to be medium.com or dev.to (which is starting to fill up with this same kind of bullshit content in the article).

>"1) stop trying to learn from random blogs, get a book. Books are still out there and you can learn just as good from them now as 20 years ago."

Many books are not much better. While blog posts are bloated for SEO purposes, books are bloated to reach their target page count.

And they often assume the reader is a complete novice, which means a lot of pages are wasted on obvious yada yada and then there's less space for genuinely interesting deep stuff that you'd only learn from an expert (or through a lot of practice and trial & error).

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