alt Hacker NewsNobody cracks open a programming book anymore
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The decline of programming books removed a constraint on programming language complexity. At one point, the basic set of books for Java was six volumes. That's when language books broke down from sheer complexity. The combination of Google search and Stack Overflow allowed programming to become more complex than anyone could keep in their head. C++ bloated to the point that people who used to be C++ language lawyers couldn't keep up.
This follows a general trend. Areas which used to be bounded by the limits of the human mind stopped being bounded that way some time back. This first appeared in corporate structure. Through the 1970s or so, there was an upper limit on corporate complexity. Beyond some point, connectivity problems started to choke the organization. There were classic ways around this, mainly dividing companies into sub-companies with their own profit lines. "The Concept of the Corporation" by Peter Drucker describes how General Motors did that. GM was at the time a group of loosely connected car companies under one corporate roof.
A few companies figured out scaling early. Sears was famous for having developed the "Schedule System", which reduced fulfillment overhead from O(N * M) to O(N log M). This allowed Sears to run a giant ordering plant out of Chicago to serve the whole country. But many companies didn't scale well, and choked as they grew. Westinghouse is a classic example.
As computers came in, the scaling problems receded. Airlines got their reservation systems under control, and seat utilization went up. Logistics went from warehouses to fulfillment centers, with much shorter holding times in inventory. Chains no longer were limited in size - WalMart, McDonalds, and the big banks could expand to planetary scale. The giant corporate paper-pushing plants disappeared.
So did forced organizational simplicity. Companies had, at some level, to be simple. Otherwise they became unmanageable. As computerization proceeded, that constraint was relaxed.
Finance achieved previously unimaginable levels of complexity. Until the 1980s, most financial products were rather simple. Now, there's no limit, and the tail wags the dog. Futures markets are far bigger than the volume in the underlying commodity, and zero-sum activity dominates.
AI will accelerate this. There will be businesses no human can comprehend or manage. This may not be productive but will be profitable for someone.
Beyond the slowing you to type, the key part of the good books was the considered and mindful order of presentation. This is what had me spending money when I could get the reference manual for free - a guide, a book that taught me unfamiliar concepts in top down fashion, and took some degree of responsibility to be both accessible and comprehensive.
I love the tutoring of LLM, but to this day as a complement to a guided book. I don't find such guided books in computer science much anymore sadly, but for now I still do it in other venues - French, Biology Astrophysics and such. I grab a book, and then use LLM to supplement my reading as my mind always has a myriad questions :).
Not entirely sure why computer science is so radically different - maybe because things change and get obsolete too fast? At any rate, cuddling with a book is still my favourite way to learn a new topic, much as I spend 12 hrs a day eagerly typing and staring at the screen as well :).
Not true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover. In fact, I've probably read each page in "Rust for Rustaceans" at least twice to ensure that I understood some of the more subtle points. I could have developed a half-baked notion of how the borrow-checker worked by fooling around and reading blurbs on Stack Exchange. But Rust for Rustaceans made clear the more subtle points that might have taken years of tinkering to understand. Thank goodness people still write excellent books on computer programming.
I tried to introduce a partner to programming with an introductory Python book one year ago. It was brand new on the shelf in the impulse purchase area at Micro Center. It looked nice on the outside and decently vetted at a glance of the intro and a page or two, I trusted Micro Center (undeserved in retrospect), and I was in a bit of a rush. I gave it to my partner to try out on their own and they started having trouble pretty quick, and it wasn't really their fault - it was using a lot of technical terms and concepts with no explanation that you wouldn't expect someone to know who hasn't taken a few Computer Science classes.
And the best part.. it was Python 2.7. Micro Center sold me a brand new, glossy covered "Learn Python" book based on 2.7 in the year Anno Domini 2025. Its instructions didn't even properly tell you to install that version, so if you even make it that far you're going to be lost why the syntax is wrong for every example.
Moral is, books are just as easy to strike out on as a bad online resource. Honestly, I feel like Googling "x language tutorial" is probably going to get you the best results much more easily than picking something off the book shelf - if I can't vet a book reliably, and I already know the damn language inside and out, what hope does a newcomer have?
There is a good ending at least. Among a bunch of random stuff I got from an infrared spectroscopy shop that was closing down and practically giving away all their cool equipment, I found a copy of K&R C. I'd never read it myself but I'd heard so much about it online over the years that I figured it was as worth a try. So I got the victim of the Python book set up with WSL and gcc, and they had a much better time that time around.
> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month
The crazy thing is that SO is dying so quickly that it's already under half that amount.
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...
> You already know why, more or less. ChatGPT has over 900 million monthly active users. GitHub Copilot has 4.7 million paying subscribers as of January 2026, up roughly 75% in a year. You can’t imagine writing software without Claude Code anymore.
It's a shame because to guide a coding agent, you need to have the right grammar and vocabulary to describe what you want and how you want it to be built. Junior devs should read not because they need to know how to write the code, but they need to know the vocabulary and the grammar to guide the agents.
I’ve felt kinda sad that I haven’t read a programming book recently. I think part of the reason is there is higher ROI (and enjoyment) in playing around with LLMs/agents.
I expect it’ll swing back, though. At least I would expect to refocus on learning fundamentals, languages, etc. once the hype dies down.
I’ll be very sad if these books don’t exist when the dust settles. LLMs are great but they don’t come close to a well-written technical book.
> Stack Overflow is receiving about 3,800 questions a month, which is what it was getting in 2008, before it had finished being launched.
Interesting, is SO getting traffic again? I thought it wasn't doing well? Or have they adapted?
> The programming book was, when you look at it squarely, always a slightly absurd object. Printed text on bound paper, describing software that lived on screens, which the reader had to retype, by hand, into a screen of their own.
The point of programming books was never "give a man a fish" but "teach a man to fish." If you were not hands on, experimenting, and instead copy-pasting you likely didn't get anything out of the book anyway.
I very much miss OPAMP techincal books in Los Angeles, and later the Fry's technical books section. Barnes and Noble and my local library still carry some. There's just nothing that gives you that random access to the unknown unknowns like a bookshelf. Using an AI to give you suggestions can come close, but as they're now switching to ad placement pushing product instead of really pulling from a mega training pool it will become useless.
My dad asked what to get our 13 year old as a birthday present. So I asked him, and he said Jon Duckett’s JavaScript and JQuery book - which he realises is a bit dated by now (2014), but he wanted it anyway (in part because he already has the other two books in the series), so that’s what he’s got.
And sometimes a “dated” book is still valuable. One night recently I was having trouble getting him to go to sleep because he was getting overstimulated by Bob DuCharme’s The Operating System Handbook (1994) - which is valuable in getting into his head that there exist systems which are very different from his beloved Linux (it covers MVS, VM/CMS, OpenVMS, and OS/400) [0]
For years I’ve been buying him books and watching him fail to actually read them-I’m pleased at 13 that’s finally changed
[0] I have the hardcover edition which I bought in the 90s, but now you can get a free PDF from the author: https://www.snee.com/bob/opsys/part1intro.pdf
I just bought $600 worth of programming books and I’m pretty stoked to read them. Mostly a lot of titles considered “the classics” but my brain works best with hard print materials.
> The kid who is right now learning to code by chatting with an agent is not a worse programmer than I was at 12, hunched over Learning Perl, retyping examples that would not run because I missed a semicolon.
To be honest, I'm 17 y.o., I'm coding by chatting with an agent, but it seems like we can't tell the distinction too absolutely.
At the first time writing a React app, I forgot to name a file with a .tsx extension and I used .ts instead, then spotting ugly error lines across my JSX syntax, confusing and sharing with my friend, and laughing this little funny thing all the day.
I once spent the whole afternoon choosing a js linter, reading their docs and perceiving different tastes. In my early twelve-ties (uh this sounds funny too) I'm always arrested by configuring Windows PEs, installing different Linux distributions on my PC, etc. Today I still read tech books, alongside videos, articles and also chatbots. Chatbot is a new tool, but there's no doubt it cannot replace other media types and what they bring to us/me.
What may I express is that a natural interest in programming or computer things cannot really be overwhelmed by LLM things. I don't know how to use vim skillfully since I majorly used Windows at my early age and I'm not familiar with vim's logic, but this practically doesn't stop anything. I still found Linux's fantasy, at last. And same for LLMs.
I think this is an age thing but I think young people getting into programming are dramatically underserved by not doing this. I think Claude/ChatGPT are great at getting answer to a specific question or set of questions and even going quite deep on it, but they don't offer the clarity of the human 'big picture' and 'right order for introducing these concepts' view on a topic, at least not yet.
Edit: I should say, topic conceptual based books I mean here. Something like 'Designing Data Intensive Pipelines', not 'Learn Python' which is out of date before it's even published
Personally, I've cracked very few programming books and I've been building websites since ~2004 back when magazines and books were the best sources for information. Some people learn skills from books well, and some people end up bewildered and confused until they can actually try it out and see how it works. I need to explore to discover and learn.
I did find "Eloquent JavaScript" very helpful, it didn't just get me started on JavaScript but actually introduced that whole computer-sciencey side of programming that I hadn't encountered in my various markup and stylesheet language coding. I never finished Eloquent JavaScript though, it was like a springboard that got me into JavaScript (which is dynamic and has an interactive runtime) and as soon as I could be having a conversation with JavaScript at runtime, from there I continued learning by talking to the REPL and seeing what happened.
I think it might have been a cognitive development thing, but at some point in high school, Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" just kinda clicked for me, like I hadn't been reading it properly before.
I've cracked into quite a few programming books over the years and it's pretty crazy how much of an advantage it's given me. I'm a lowly systems engineer, not even a real programmer, but I definitely understand networking better than the majority of programmers at my company because I read Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated 10 years back. (and I read the OLD version from the 90s that was already dated when I read it!) And then I read UNIX Network Programming to help understand all the different sockets APIs and that's paid dividends too, because I get our network programming code better than most of my coworkers too.
Then there was that one time I was self-studying computer architecture (Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective) and was able to turn what I learned around and hack our binary code at a customer site because I wasn't in an environment where I could compile our code... and then years later, when I wanted to analyze the ROM of a 90s electronic device with a much simpler instruction set than x86, I wasn't afraid to crack open the thing in Ghidra
Let's see, what else have I read that's paid dividends over the years:
- Modern Operating Systems (Tannenbaum)
- Learning Python (Lutz)
- JavaScript - The Definitive Guide (Flanagan)
- Programming PHP (Tatroe)
- Learning Web Design (Robbins)
- Algorithms (Sedgewick)
- A book I read whose name escapes me now, about technologies like RS-282/RS-484 and serial communications in general
- (I could probably put down Cuckoo's Egg too as an "inspiration" for me ultimately getting interested in computers and networking, and I bet that's not too uncommon a story)
It's probably a sign of my age (mid 30s for reference), but when I'm curious about something and want to learn it really deeply - I look for a good book on the topic. (although I'm willing to admit that maybe this process hinders me in some ways, because it means I sometimes spend more time studying than I actually do working with a thing - I have spent a LOT more time reading about circuits than building them - but I like studying so I'm happy either way)
Why is everyone so focused on programming language specific books? Even when I was in uni before stack overflow I did not find them that useful. All reference docs were already online.
However the theory books are still worth reading, if you read any of the intro Tanenbaum books from cover to cover you know the subject far better than everyone not directly working in the subject (and probably more than many that do).
Doing any kind of mildly-complex parallel programming code without having a theory book about it fresh in your head should be a crime.
I type this comment flanked by my shelves of computer books. Most I keep for sentimental or historical value. My first edition K&R, the first PostScript Red Book, the volumes of The Art of Computer Programming, and many animal books. In addition to what the author said, what saddens me is that most developers today will not have these milestones of their growth as a software engineer to look back upon. Our history is literally evaporating into the cloud.
I have a small collection of programming/technology books, some from O'Reilly, others from Manning and No Starch Press. I've read them and they have been very helpful, but I will admit that I been buying less books. They take up space, and my shelves are full of these and other books like novels and manga.
Also, now when I am trying to learn a language, I just work on a project and search in the docs (or just on Kagi) to find what I am trying to do. Maybe a physical book would be a quicker reference, and maybe I should buy some more of them.
P.S. I enjoy finding old computer books (like DOS/Win95 era) at the thrift store.
This is just because there are more avenues to learn the same thing
I never bought a programming book in all of my professional career, since the 90s. The only ones I did buy were the K&R C book and the Pascal book at university. They were mandatory readings and basically the only way to learn those languages. Perl? Man pages and online. Tcl? Same thing. When I started working, my company had the whole series of the X11 books (my university too) and we had the Java books. We did use them but Javadocs on the web started to be faster to use than books. Then every reference on the web has been more up to date than any book. Javascript, Ruby, Python, PHP, Elixir, Erlang all of them online. I'm sure that I'm forgetting a bunch of other languages. Blogs are about as good as books about patterns, ideas, best practices etc. I just didn't see the point of buying paper when I could read the same things on a screen for free.
Curiously, I do buy and read tech books. My hobby is legacy OS kernel research so I bought some second handed books on old Linux (kernel 1.2) and NT (3.1). It is fun to research so I don’t use AI often for side projects.
This predates LLMs. The internet has been the primary source of programming knowledge for decades.
Books are still good for the fundamentals of course.
My two favorite non-fiction sections of the bookstore are dead and dying. The computer section, if it still exists, is just things like _Excel for Dummies_, and the philosophy books have all been pushed out by self help and dime-store "metaphysics".
But I've started reading programming books again recently, on my e-reader and on my laptop. People are still writing them, and they're still good. We should all go buy some!
For my own usage, I don't see chatbots as supplanting textbooks. If anything, they pair well; reading a book from cover to cover gives me the breadth and depth I want, but LLMs are there for tangents and questions that come up along the way. I was reading a book and chatting with Claude like tihs just yesterday, for a few hours.
The problem is knowledge gaps. You don't know what you don't know.
A good book deals with that.
For example, my Effective Pandas book teaches best practices that most never learn because the blog posts that train the models are actually espousing anti patterns.
(As an author I'm keenly aware that fewer folks are buying books.)
Reading a well written programming book will put you ahead of 99% of other programmers using that language. Most programmers learn some subset of a language to get things working, and never learn more than that.
This might be an unpopular thing to do, but lately I've been literally having claude/chatgpt write books for my personal consumption: things to brush up interview skills, python, system design, and even agentic coding. I've also had it aggregate substack posts for me, etc.
I have it generate an ePub file, and drag and drop it to my kindle.
It's a great way to take information with me, out for a long walk where I can focus on it and absorb it.
I've not read a programming book for years, even before LLMs came on the scene. Didn't see the need to when there's so much information online.
These days, I don't use LLMs for actual programming but will ask them questions in lieu of doing a web search. It's like documentation I can chat to. Basically a more efficient blog post or book chapter that happens to be dedicated to whatever it is I'm working on.
I started learning software in the early 2010s and I read a lot of software books like the ones mentioned in the article. I continued reading them as the years went on, but the last one I bought was probably 4 or 5 years ago. Naturally, I probably don't need books as much as I used to -- I can generally pick up something new and know where to find what I need to find, "learning to learn" and all that. I also think they are better for foundational knowledge; many times the books become outdated very quickly. So if I was gonna attempt to write a database or learn distributed programming theory, I'd probably pick up a book, but if I wanted to learn a specific tool (or most languages) I'd probably stick to the web.
I do not think they are too valuable anymore as references you keep coming back to, that use-case has been long superseded by the internet, well before AI. But for a novice learning programming, I still believe that there's absolutely no substitute to reading a book from cover to cover.
I have seen a myriad examples of people that have half-learned a language from random snippets in the web (or from AI now), and the struggle never ends. And taught courses or videos tend to be too time-inefficient and too shallow, more of an intro.
A good book is still by far the best way to get the complete and cohesive overview of a technology and put it into context. It gives you the kind of mental model that allows you to solve fresh problems from first principles thinking, because you understand the whole breadth and depth of how the technology works.
I once bought a programming book in the 1990s. Since then, I never found the need for it anymore: you could simply find all the resources you needed online (and long before ChatGPT).
StackOverflow is kinda forgotten now, but there was a time where you could find the answers to pretty much all your programming questions there, and if not, you could simply post a question yourself (and yes, there was a time where SO was pleasant to use and your question didn't get immediately shut down by overzealous admins).
I personally never liked learning a programming language from a book. Like, in the early days of Java, I would get so much more use out of the then excellent API docs than out of secondary material.
And of course, programming is one of those disciplines where you really have to just try it out to really make progress.
I've found programming books good at what the internet isn't always: a cohesive story/presentation meant for a broad audience. I've enjoyed reading some more style-oriented books, largely ignoring beyond the gist. Learning about dependency injection and decoupled architecture, but for Python, completely changed how I viewed the language.
I also once read a book on MS SQL Sever 200x, which I don't remember much of, and I don't think it was terribly useful anyway. If I wanted to know the size of a datatype I'd Google it.
I don't feel that LLMs are replacing books for professionals.
The problem with LLM learning is not that they can't explain a concept, but you have to know what to ask in the first place. To get a deep proper answer from LLMs you need a deep precise prompt. When you learn the new topic, you don't know about the topic itself, so you need a properly structured interleaved material to grasp new concepts.
After you get the concepts from books, you can prompt the LLM for particular non-covered subjects you are interested in.
So even these days when I'm interested in some topic, I sometimes even ask the very same LLM to provide me top-10,top-20 books for the topic, with short overview for which type and level of readers and style they are, pick a few and read them.
LLM is a replacement for docs and simple questions on StackOverflow, not for the real organized knowledge that requires a few hours session of concentration to understand.
Stack Overflow provides marginal value when there are LLMs. Great technical books on the other hand still provide tremendous value and complement LLMs in a learning process: a book provides a fact checked, curated set of topics with clear start and finish (a structure) and LLMs help with any blockers or missing context that readers will encounter.
Ironically, I just ordered a hardcopy of "Python Crash Course". I want to learn it for personal use and prefer to have the book at hand, rather than in PDF/electronic format. And no, I'm not letting AI or LLMs do the job for me: I prefer (rally: need) my brain to stay active.
I recently purchased Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective [0] and am currently working through it with pen and paper.
I've only had peripheral exposure to writing in assembly and "systems level" programming so I'm really quite enjoying it.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspect...
I still have my copy of Learning Perl. Mostly because it represents a milestone in my learning. I have kept and obtained a number of other books simply because they are antiquated, special and/or classics that are interesting to read even if they are not that useful to me, like Codd's relational book, or Calendrical Calculations. I hope the AI is trained on these sorts of books, so that the knowledge can live on in a different way.
I like books because of their holistic approach and I am saving this as I am seeing some good recommendations.
I do buy programming books!
I even sometimes read them without touching a computer.
Studies show that books is the best media to learn. Forget video, books + practice (now with AI explanations) is my learning methodology.
I don't think it's fair to blame this on LLMs. The last time I bought or even looked at a book of this type was easily 20 years ago.
And I wouldn't have it any other way. I remember my ginormous Visual Basic 3 Bible from the 90s with great fondness and nostalgia, but thumbing through a dead-tree book to figure out computery things is just not a thing I care to do.
Having said that, I still think there's room for computer related "books"... of the digital kind, at least. It honestly feels a little absurd to even consider buying a physical book for this sort of purpose.
I convinced my mom to buy me a book on C++ when I was 13 (25+ years ago). I made it to page ~75 or so before I got bored of reading, and needed to start building stuff to stay interested. I don't think I ever looked at it or any other language book again after that.
This post feels misleading or possibly just nostalgic. The books referenced still exist because the people creating the technology are still writing them. They're also creating video and attending conferences (virtual or otherwise). That's not going away anytime soon. But perhaps what has changed is how the information is accessed.
Do you need to debug some ancient perl? Sure, ask Claude. You'll get an answer and move on. But if you're looking to learn how to use the next technology before it's mainstream, you'll go looking for that material. And it's there, where you expect it to be. Do you still watch network television or haunt Blockbuster? Times change and the market moves on. The interesting thing is, people like books and they're also available for those looking for a physical artifact to hold. Most of what's available is POD. Depending on the title, you're hitting the print button when you place the order.
The “higher level of abstraction” phrase used to describe what LLMs are in relation to programming… That phrase needs to die.
This seems like a good opportunity to share my recent photos from a bookstore in Tokyo… just a crazy number of computer books. Mostly in Japanese language.
Many of those are not programming books, but they do seem to be recently published, I wish my Japanese was better.
@cylo (I think the author) - get in touch, I'd like to use this essay as part of a photo book project. With your permission of course.
Nobody code anymore!!
Before the rise of AI, developers were basically doing copy/paste from StackOverflow. There are few developers who knows how to code.
Even DevOps engineer, I worked with CI/CD "specialist" who couldn't work for sht, if you asked him anything outside StackOverflow, he couldn't answer.
But there is a silver line for everything.....
I am not a developer but I learned to code with Perplexity AI, but not copy/paste, anything I didn't understand I asked it to explain why.
I wrote my first python app with classes, functions, 94% code quality coverade, the mock unittest was 4x bigger than the actual code. I can start a python script from scratch without looking at my own examples.
I would never be able to do that within a few weeks by looking at forums that often have worse response than AI hallucination.
I still read programming books, especially if I want to check out a new language and get the gist of its capabilities and how are things are done in that specific environment. Also I prefer to read a book written by an author that I know has the experience and the insight to actually write the book than read random sources on the internet. Or maybe I am just used to it.
haven't done it physically in a long time, but surely virtually.
my 0.02 on the matter: things are stacked against you even if you are not strapped for time.
a vast majority of the stack is changing too fast and non-digital versions are not appropriate beyond learning the base of a language or high-level design patterns.
as publishing became super accessible, there is also a plethora of options, and increasingly difficult to sift between the lower-quality stuff and the diamonds.
for most people, very few (kinds of) programming books exist today that could stay relevant beyond the university.
I'm the author of O'Reilly's "Learning Go". Here are the last 13 months of paperback book sales:
- Mar 2026: 124
- Feb 2026: 140
- Jan 2026: 157
- Dec 2025: 306
- Nov 2025: 484
- Oct 2025: 218
- Sep 2025: 176
- Aug 2025: 136
- Jul 2025: 317
- Jun 2025: 230
- May 2025: 237
- Apr 2025: 165
- Mar 2025: 367
Sales are certainly down, but it has gone up and down in the past.
Since the 1st edition came out in 2021, it has sold roughly 20,000 copies (about 10,500 English paperback copies, 3,800 ebooks, and 6,700 translated copies). The 2nd edition came out in 2024 and has sold roughly 13,000 copies (about 8,300 English paperback copies, about 3,000 ebooks, and about 1,600 translated copies).
Most of the money comes from O'Reilly's online platform, not from book sales. That has been declining lately, partially because the latest edition is now over 2 years old, but also I suspect that people are cancelling O'Reilly subscriptions and just relying on LLMs (which have indexed all of the books and used pirated copies to do so).