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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Lots of good questions in this, but to answer the question in the title:

When I started working corporate in 1999, every engineer had their own library of tech books. We would all share books with each other. You could tell how senior someone was by how big their book collection was.

At once point, one of our senior people got laid off. Since the books were bought by the company he had to leave them all behind.

Us juniors descended on his cube like vultures, negotiating and trading all of his books to start building up our own libraries.

When I left the company they let me buy my books for $5, so I took them with me, and took them to my next two jobs. I stopped carrying them when everything the contained could be found online.

I have to say, I do sometimes miss learning tech stuff from books. While it's all online and in theory up to date, there is something to be said for the curated experience of a book.

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I carried around an impressive software engineering personal library, through various jobs and grad school. And it had a few benefits.

Even when I was poor and sleeping on the floor because I didn't own furniture, and didn't have health insurance, I'd still buy books (and cheap lunches with the team). I'd also print out a lot of tech docs from the Internet, and put them in discarded binders that I labeled neatly.

In addition to what I learned from the books and could reference from my library, there might've also been a signaling benefit. Early in my career, I was a kid with no degree, working as an intern at a hardcore software&hardware engineering company. I suspect that, on occasion, the impressive library signaled to people coming by my work space that at least I had interest/ambition/hustle (or maybe just presumptuousness).

Nowadays, the tech industry has way too much signaling, posturing, and self-promoting. But, before I get too judgmental, I should remember when I was starting out, and at least had an inkling of awareness that colleagues seeing my books couldn't hurt my opportunities.

> Nowadays, the tech industry has way too much signaling, posturing, and self-promoting

I think this can be sifted through. Strange and unusual tech or adjacent books suggest that the person has exhausted all the common ones or that they started getting the books mentioned in other books and kept doing that process. You can even ask them why they have one.

For instance I've got a copy of the 1926 text The Analysis of Art by Dewitt Parker because of Jim McCarthy's praise for the text in his book Dynamics of Software Development.

Then again, with books people tend to have either 0, about a dozen, or hundreds. I'm in group 3, maybe it's a problem.

Did you read all of them?

Can be so kind to you recommend one or perhaps top5?

For what? I think everyone that programs should read Tracy Kiddars Soul of a New Machine, Ries&Trout The 22 immutable laws of marketing,

My #3 is way lower, which follows one of the 22 laws, but probably Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons.

Those are three enjoyable books that are pretty easy to read and have pretty valuable lessons in them that can take quite a long time to truly appreciate.

The task of a programmer is to create efficient and elegant machines based on thoughts by using imagination. Human creations by human hands, programming is a social product. Algorithms and data structures are actually the more shallow lesson. Creating something that finds place in the world is the true challenge.

> Did you read all of them?

To say it with Umberto Eco[1]: A library is a research tool. A library of books you've all read is worthless.

[1] I have read that directly from Eco, I guess in some old book about how to write scientific papers. I can't find that anymore. The thought is reference in Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan", though.

> For instance I've got a copy of the 1926 text The Analysis of Art by Dewitt Parker because of Jim McCarthy's praise for the text in his book Dynamics of Software Development.

If anyone is interested, here is the The Analysis of Art book on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/analysisofart00park/mode/2up

I keep 4 shelves of technical books on my bookshelf behind my home office desk. Some are "old," from the 70s. Many were thrifted. And then I have, I don't know, about 300+ pounds of (mostly) technical books in storage boxes in the garage.

For technical stuff I prefer to have both physical and digital copies of some books. For non-technical, I tend to go fully digital (except reference material, like my D&D books). I like going analog to read technical stuff, I'm not exactly sure why.

Anyway, I believe that reading is a super power that's helped me throughout my life. I try very hard to impress this on others, especially people that I mentor. I've actually been accused of "only knowing" this or that because I "read a lot." Well, no shit, and if others bothered themselves with it they'd learn cool shit, too!

> I've actually been accused of "only knowing" this or that because I "read a lot." Well, no shit, and if others bothered themselves with it they'd learn cool shit, too!

So much this. I can't get smarter, I was born with the brain I was born with, but I can easily fill up time reading and remembering all kinds of crap someone else won't put the time for.

>> I've actually been accused of "only knowing" this or that because I "read a lot." Well, no shit, and if others bothered themselves with it they'd learn cool shit, too!

Once I had a manager challenging on making things up regarding a rather thick white paper he forwarded me, because there is no way I could have read it that fast. Once he saw I commented the whole thing beginning to end in Word, well, his face was priceless. Side effect was me looking for a new job a couple of months later.

Totally agree on reading as kind of a super power. Reading in the sense of reading and understanding, do so rather quickly, and be able to condense the relevant parts out of whatever text you. And remember the rest well enough to be able to look it up when needed. Same goes for handbooks, people, read your damn handbooks!

It's funny so, that for RPG stuff I went all digital with the exception of the existing pre-PDF era collection I have. And for technical stuff I am like you, preferably paper. For English literature India is a really good source to get those books at affordable prices through Amazon. Pretty sure those sellers are not supposed, or even allowed, to sell internationally, but they do. Worst case print quality is somewhat sub-par, from what I saw with some of my colleagues, or the cover is somewhat generic (in case of the majority of my library). The editions are the same so, content wise.

"I have to say, I do sometimes miss learning tech stuff from books. While it's all online and in theory up to date, there is something to be said for the curated experience of a book."

I miss the times when you could read K&R, one of Stroustroup's books and an STL book and you pretty much knew most of what there was to know.

Along with Stevens’ Programming in the UNIX environment, a few volumes of the X Window System and Inside Macintosh.

My dojo.

That was never most of what there was to know. Lambda calculus was invented before computers.

Did you really not miss anything from the physical books? I tend to buy the most highly recommended books for areas I'm interested in, and the quality of explanation and structure routinely beats anything I can find about the topic online. And that's not niche knowledge, goes for undergrad level maths and physics even.

I agree! I think there's a level of didactic intentionality that the effort of publishing a book mandates. A blogpost or Stack Overflow answer or wiki page is typically more like a reference for a particular topic; finding 300 contiguous, organized pages that cover the breadth and depth of a topic on the Internet is not common. The only thing that comes close in my experience is a subset of online courses, the ones that seek to give a foundational understanding more than a step-by-step tutorial of how to make something happen.

I feel like I've read this before some here...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403174 I have!!

Hah! Well it was relevant again!

I still learn and teach (informally) from books. You can find everything online, but there’s something specifically useful about the long form survey or completion of ideas that comes from a well written book as well as the physical reference. I don’t think books are a till I’ll ever take out of my bag.

Presently working on getting my feet wet with machine learning and primarily with a book. Of course it’s out of date the second it’s printed with a fast moving topic but it has still been incredibly useful as a survey and basics.

> When I left the company they let me buy my books for $5, so I took them with me, and took them to my next two jobs. I stopped carrying them when everything the contained could be found online.

Not just online but also more up to date.

This is a drawback of books, they don't auto-update and upgrades are quite expensive. In IT I don't see a point to keeping them archived anymore.

I still use them for learning new topics though.

I still buy books and have a nice little library of tech books. I try to only buy books for things that don’t change much.

> it's all online and in theory up to date

yes, and every old version going back, all completely up to those dates too

I did the same until recently. A lot of the Rust books are worth owning the paper version.

Have you made this comment before? Strong sense of deja vu with this one.

It wasn’t a copy/paste but I’ve told this story before. See the sibling comment for the link. :)

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