Ask HN: Should I continue to binge reading CS books from secondary sources?

PRIMARY SOURCES are important because computer science, programming and software engineering are not abstractions that exist outside of history, outside of their practitioners. There is a lot of PATH DEPENDENCY and TECH DEBT that simply exists and which guides theory and practice, and we cannot wish it away by pointing to an objectively superior technical solution.

HISTORY helps to explain why this came to be and often these primary sources serve as historical records and they make the future (our present) make sense since, as a purely TECHNICAL SOLUTION, some things or developments do not make sense.

This has become fairly evident to me when reading about data management and databases the past month, the original papers starting from 70s up to today.

Maybe try actually _doing_ some CS, rather than just binge-reading it. Find a project, write some code, and then read up about the topic in order to apply the knowledge learned to your project.

Whenever possible I recommend reading primary sources because they're often fascinating and remarkably well written works. That's why they're influential.

Why not read both?