Humble Tech Book Bundle: The Ultimate Functional Programming | Hacker News Reader

Humble Tech Book Bundle: The Ultimate Functional Programming

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17 pointsTomte11 comments

Programming Clojure's Fourth Edition was published earlier this year, so it should be very current. Alex Miller is a great writer. It's in the ~2 USD purchase :))

I've not bought anything on humble bundle in ages now. The prices have increased greatly. I'm sure the content is good but just not that spontaneous purchase anymore

FWIW, this bundle with all 17 books can be had for $18, which I'm guessing is less than the cost of a printed copy of any one of the books.

That is the case of course in this instance but still it isn't cheap enough anymore where I will just purchase off the cuff. Some now are £40 (Monster Hunter for example right now) for all the content which is a huge price increase from years gone by.

I'll take your word on the prices of game bundles since I haven't tracked that.

However I've bought book bundles every year for the past 8 years. In 2018, a full bundle was usually $15, with a suggested price of $25. Starting in 2021, the bundles were bumped up to $18, still suggested at $25 (but O'Reilly bundles cost more).

15+3 is a 20% increase, but is still below retailer's $20 threshold "impulse buy" rule of thumb.

I wonder if interest in programming books is plummeting at this point.

If anything I find books even more valuable now. They are the source for your LLMs after all. I like to read the author's own voice rather than have it regurgitated in generic form by an LLM.

Most people didn't read before LLMs and they'll still not read now, of course.

I agree, but basically my main use case for LLMs is just asking for clarification about programming questions/concepts since books don't always explain things in the most immediately understandable manner for all readers and you often have follow-up questions that the book doesn't proactively anticipate or answer.

An Isac Asimov book about a spaceship stranded in space without anyone on the team having the knowledge to repair it comes to mind.

I would imagine so, for most developers.

Ironically it's because of AI-coding that I'm spending more time practicing Haskell. And since it's still helpful to read references, I bought this bundle.

Lots of Clojure, no Scala. I wonder how Scala is doing in the field lately.

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