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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

I love picking up old technical books. They always seem to have a perspective that's lacking in more recent books (not that recent books don't _also_ have a useful perspective, just a different one). The sort of information the author assumes, or doesn't assume, conveys as much as the topic of the book itself.

I've been trying to work through The Little Schemer myself lately in the same vein as the poster. It's tough going, honestly, but so far I think it's been worth it.

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My guilty pleasure has been going through the books at thrift stores and reading the old technical manuals/guides/etc.

The biggest thing with the older ones is the lack of assumption of Internet, so the book will refer to itself instead of referring to online/other documentation.

I've learned things reading a "Missing Manual" for an operating system that is 15 years out of date that still work today.

> The biggest thing with the older ones is the lack of assumption of Internet, so the book will refer to itself instead of referring to online/other documentation.

I also miss this aspect of old books. They were more self-contained.

I feel I can get a quite detailed understanding of DOS, Windows 3.11, even Windows 95 from printed books and reference materials of the time.

But I feel much of the documentation/reference around things from 2010 is both late enough that it wasn't printed, and old enough that what was online has failed or faded away.

It helps that stable versions lasted a lot longer back then, and things moved around a lot less.

Nowadays if you need to change a setting, you not only have to contend with major version but what biannual revision of windows you are using, and hope that someone at Microsoft hasn't decided to move that option in an update.

Even the documentation that is still around is disorganized and useless. I want a linear path I can follow to learn something, not some random collection of hyperlinks to more information.

Another great thing about books is that they have a built in order to them. Start at page 1 and read the pages in order until the end. You can skip around, and they provide some aid for that via the table of contents and the index and references in the text to other parts of the text, but they (usually) are designed so that if you just start at the beginning and read through to the end you get everything the book has to offer in an order that makes sense.

Compare to far too much online documentation. This is what I've frequently run into. I want to learn about some particular subject, so I find a site that has an introduction or tutorial on that. The document is even book-like in the sense that it is organized as pages, and at the bottom of each page there are "next" and "previous" links.

But there is a sidebar on each page, with lists of related material and some of that sounds like material I'm going to need to know at some point. But there is no indication if it is material that I'm going to come across later if I just keep following the "next" links or it is something beyond the scope of the current document that I'll need to bookmark now to come back to later.

> and read the pages in order until the end

And if you put it down and pick it back up tomorrow, it will still be where you left off.

One of my favourites is "The AWK Programming Language". Very concisely written, very natural to follow, and very insightful even if you do not care about AWK at all.

https://awk.dev/

I second this. Awk is one of my favorite programming languages (I would even say, one of my favorite tools) and "The AWK Programming Language" is definitely a worthy book.

You both will like this gopher hole:

gopher://hoi.st

It has virtual machines implemented in awk, some generic awk library and a good 'phlog' to read great posts on unix, minimalism and several tools and games. The freecell game it's a easy example.

That brings back memories. I remember I had the original AWK book...it came with a 5.25" floppy disc with PolyAwk ("The Toolbox Language") inside.

GNU awk has internet/socket support so you can write a gopher/irc/finger client in few lines.

I love old books too. One I really really enjoyed is Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". It's so well written, and beautifully typeset and bound. Just a lovely little artifact.

Yes! One of my university textbooks and I still remember what a nice physical artifact it was.

I loved reading TAOCP. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as _carefully_ laid out as that series was/is.

"The Little Schemer" is one of the best programming books ever.

I have used it to teach scheme/lisp to people who would never learn "programming". It's just that good.

I think some technical writers in the past could also write novels (i.e. Jerry Pournelle) and the transfer of ability and knowledge would go both ways. So when you read a manual like the one for the Jupiter Ace, it is an absolute joy.

"You may well be wondering by this stage why the computer isn't taking any notice of all this rubbish you've typed in. The reason is not that it's already noticed it's rubbish, but simply that it hasn't looked yet. It won't take any notice until you press what is just about the most important key on the keyboard, the one marked ENTER (on the right-hand side, one row up)."

http://jupiter-ace.co.uk/downloads/JA-Manual-First-Edition-[...

I will likely never be paid to work with it, nor will I ever justify working with it, but I still have a VB6 'COMPLETE' book I am probably never throwing away, it is a lot of fun to go through it over the years and look back at how things used to be. I wish VB had retained its ability to build native apps instead of becoming a .NET language that eventually got dropped. It was a fun first-time programming language, and I'm sure there's plenty of apps still coded in VB6 out in production right now...

And I thought I was the only one with this hobby of buying and reading old computer programming books.

I must admit, though, that I buy way more of them than I read.

I went on an archaeological tear a few years ago and acquired every book that I could find that talked about higher-level assembly language programming, such as XPL/S, "A systems Implementation Language for the Xerox Sigma Computers" and "Machine Oriented Higher Level Languages".

The Little Schemer is one of my favorite books. Really delightful.

TLS is a very rewarding book. I get back to the ideas therein often. While most things become natural after a while, I find that technique of building function to collect more than one value at a time sometimes very useful.

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