Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

Hot take: I'm reading programming books more now. There is so much to know about any technological topic and an LLM can tell you all of it, but it's overwhelming. What a book does is disciple and structure what you need to know, and what order to learn it in. Start with a book, grow your knowledge and put it into practice with an LLM.

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 had a taste of OReilly books through ACM/IEEE. A few years pass and I'm working on some obscure legacy code and a book saved me. Needed it in a hurry so signed up for OReilly books for a year even though only needed it for four weeks. I have renewed it since and enjoy it, being able to dip into topics, just for fun, written by people telling a story. The long form of a book is quite different from SO and new books keep coming out. I'm hooked.

It doesn't matter so much if the LLMs are better or worse for learning things. I tend to think much worse in the long term. The problem is the reduction in choice. Soon we won't have web search. No user generated content. No genuine personal interaction. No blogs. No personal computer industry. No tech book publishers. Its all going to be LLM generated content owned by a small group of people. It sucks. I am in the opt out group wondering what exactly will be left to opt out into.

I would argue in the case of Rust that the digital book is much better than the physical one, I mostly bought it to put it on my shelf.

Maybe someone disagrees, I'm open to hearing what the book has taught you that the digital docs/book didn't.

It used to be that you could buy a book and use it as a reference for years. That stopped being true sometime in the 1990s, as the half life of book value declined rapidly.

One persistent internet and Altavista became available it was just a matter of time, and now we're there. The whole move fast and break things culture won.

Like Chesterton's fence, you don't know what you're got until it's gone.

"there are coffee stains where the caffeine blots are somehow still a valid Perl program"

Having coded Perl for years, I take that personally, pal...

I'm reading The C Programming Language, 2nd edition (the K&R book), and working through all the exercises.

It's a great book, although it's forcing me to admit that I need glasses (the print is so small)!

If nobody cracks open a programming book, then I must be nobody - I read books all the time - both hardcopies and digital. They're my bedtime reading

It's not just AI.

I grew up with borrowed ZX Spectrum manuals that detailed the Z80 assembly language, (a clone of) a Red Book that came with the (clone of a) Apple II computer that had assembly listings, and fold-out circuit-board diagrams for the whole computer. I taught myself C++ from the manual that came with Borland Turbo C++ and the Waite Group C book. I laughed out loud at footnotes in the Camel book, which I read from the start through to where it becomes a reference. I read Sedgewick's Algorithms cover to cover for fun when I found it in a local library as a teenager. I borrowed the ancient "build a flight simulator" book from a friend in high school.

I've bought books by Kleppmann, Julia Evans, and Hillel Wayne's in-progress book on proofs. I owned the gang of four design patterns book (although I won't pretend -- like everyone else -- to have done more than skim a few patterns!)

And yet.

For many, many years now every time I've wondered into a bookstore, and meandered over to the fondly-remembered computer books section with a sense of nostalgia, I've just been deeply disappointed and sad. If you're lucky, you'll find one or two books that look worth reading, and the rest is just the product of some giant publishing machine whose sole purpose seems to be to fleece unsuspecting neophytes of their money by pushing on them hastily written books on whatever the current fad is. Often when you look at the publication date and compare it to the release date of the software, it's obvious you couldn't write a _good_ book that fast.

And they're all huge. The C Programming Language, Javascript: the good parts, and The Go Programming Language are just about the only three examples I know of where concision was considered a virtue. Most are just fluffy as hell, which is offensive to the kind of mind that wants to learn a programming language.

Add to that the observation in the article that paper books for programming languages are inherently weird.

So yeah, nobody cracks open a programming book anymore, but there are lots of compelling reasons beside AI, reasons that make you grateful if AI can save you from having to wade through an ocean of dreck.

I can imagine a heavily curated shelf of programming books, and it would be a thing of beauty, a collection of potent fireworks shot into the dark of the unknown. But, like, who would go to Barnes and Noble or whatever and actually see it, and actually buy something?

I believe it really depends on the programming book. For introductory topics (Learning Python, HTTP Basics) one is better off with sources from Google or GPT generated since they are much simpler, faster to access and high quality sources out there. But for more low level topics, books like "Designing Data Intensive Applications" are still the first option for most people; you can't easily find corresponding material online that provides the same level of depth, structure, and context.

I printed a ton of books from libgen in the past 10 years.

Using paper just works better for me.

I do use LLMs for asking questions, and other learning tools.

I always thought it would be fun to write an o’Reilly book. The format seems like a fun way to organise information on learning about a topic.

what a beautifully written essay!

no AI can write it like this.

the same will apply to software. You just wait and see the day when disclaimers like 'No AI involved' would be a signal of high quality, especially for software on which lives depend.

Good thing I’m actively writing a programming book!

(Reading HN to procrastinate.)

I used to read a book or two when diving into a new language. But I think the last time I did that was in 2017 when I learned Swift. That was supplemented with a lot of Stackoverflow.

I think the next deep dive was in 2022, when I learned Go. But that was completely from online sources.

> You can’t imagine writing software without Claude Code anymore.

I know it's a hyperbole but repeat a lie often enough...

I still even now feel that K&R C should be a mandatory reading for CS students, but alas.

Love the closeout of the article: "On page 112 there are coffee stains where the caffeine blots are somehow still a valid Perl program."

> They were thick, they cost about $50, and they had titles like “Learning React” and “HTTP: The Definitive Guide”.

The most effective way to make money from open soruce was (for a time at least) to be Tim O'Reilly, Amazon, or Google.

Ive bought 100 or already more programming books in the last 10 years. Ofc I didn’t read all of them, maybe like half read half of them.

imo books for programming language should be roughly a guide to docs, with better context collocation and more elaborate examples, otherwise it would be really painful to use language

you can't pick up c++ from the docs and the language itself is a monstrosity, and for that you must have book explaining why do you have 30 types of pointers, golang in the meantime have excellent official guide, and you don't really need any book

Great quote: "...the things they will build with that abstraction will surprise me."

It’s bittersweet that perhaps the next generation will never truly understand how utterly insane it was that small companies were paying developers like me good money to read books, then struggle for months to create a simple CRUD app that could have simply been copied, but the company “felt it was right to build their own custom one from scratch.” This would then lead to endless management meetings full of middle managers who never truly felt comfortable turning on a laptop, only for the end result to become a mess of functionality destroyed by committee, shifting goalposts, blame directed at fired programmers, and years of completely wasted human and financial capital — all for a monstrosity built in Flash one year before it was deprecated.

My only consolation is that if the new generation never knows the true horror of human ignorance, perhaps it will spare them the generational shame.

I use AI to summarize a book because I need to use it asap for my professional works. But I do reading because I enjoy learning process, the knowledge is a bonus, not the goal

> Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore Not true for me. I still read the "Learning Rust in a month of lunches" although I ask AI to write Rust code all the times.

I also notice nobody talks about big-O performance bounds anymore.

I mean, it's not just programming books. Books and magazines for a lot of specialist fields are on the way out, since the internet is just a more convenient option.

Look at video game or pop culture coverage for example. With a few specialist exceptions, no-ones reading print media for info on them anymore. Things like YouTube and social media and specialist websites are just a lot more practical and up to date.

I get that books make it easier to go slowly (or for writers to spend the time researching), but tech is just a fast moving field. By the time something is available in print form, it's probably already near irrelevant for work purposes.

They still come in real handy when you're stuck hacking away in a windowless SCIF.

Funny, I think a dead-tree book (or PDF you won't copy from) is a great format to learn programming from. Retyping things into the editor is underrated, as a form of engaging more viscerally with the material (brains work better when they get to play with the clay), as a way to build muscle memory for the language, as a way to absorb idioms by osmosis, and so forth.

Different brains, different strokes, but I think the book format is not wrong, the teaching and learning expectations are.

I've bought (and cracked open) more programming books in the past year than I had in the previous 10. I'm nobody?

Don’t worry, once LLMs poison the well enough by disincentivizing sharing content online, technical books will thrive again.

Remember man pages to learn an write C. Guided AI is good if it learns from a book not crap code found on GitHub.

The most transformative book for me has been SICP and Uncle Bob's work.

The main issue I have is by the time I got my brick delivered from Amazon about SwiftUI 3rd edition, the 4th edition was out. It's a door stopper now.

They're also incredibly useless. If I get a digital book, I can search it, highlight and categorize. And it doesn't weigh or occupy the size of a phone book. Many programming books are just gnarly and unpleasant for casual reading (unless it's a small thin book but it won't go into enough details).

I won't get into the copy pasting argument because someone will inevitably argue about how you should type the examples by hand to learn more! but not consider how many examples are in a book...

So when it comes to buying classics like K&R, get a printed version! But when it comes to 400+ pages, nope, buy digital.

So I think people still crack open books, but they're not paper ones nearly as much.

I do feel that programming is more accessible than ever though.

i have the full version of that book, Learning the vi and Vim Editors... i still read it!

With a programming book, you invested time to thoroughly learn something new. The language/tool and its associated way of thinking were now part of your toolbox. You were simply a better programmer going forward.

With AI that toolbox doesn’t grow. You don’t become better, everything from now on will be wrangled into shape with the frozen set of skills you have at this point.

For some people this is fine. For me the endless learning and sharpening of the blade is one of this most appealing parts of programming, so I hate this.

People still use programming books, they just don't purchase new retail books as often. Books have become magnitudes cheaper for publishers to produce but the books didn't get cheaper for consumers. I went to O'Reilly's site, clicked on the first book that popped up and it costs $67.99 for a digitally printed paperback book:

https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/345913182/ai-engineering/c...

Take a guess why so many younger devs will opt to pirate a PDF rather than purchase retail programming books. Publishers are pricing themselves out of the market.

This corporate messaging of "just use AI, cut as many corners as possible, only retain the essential people and force them to sling slop 7 days a week" is unsustainable.

It's wrong for so many reasons. It disrupts talent pipelines. The staff+ people probably don't want to work twice as hard to cover the cut headcount. In general, people prefer to work on systems that are well architected and not some slop that got vibe coded up in a weekend.

They (corporate upper management) could've just done nothing and the end result would've been better than whatever the fuck is happening right now

Llm learning fosters mediocrity

I love these books. I would like to own every single one of them, as crystallizations of a moment. But let's be real -- some of these books are trash.

Amazon taxes books through shipping. It is a plan.

that's not true

The author is blaming llms alone. And is not even mentioning sites where you can download any and every book you wish. That might have led to decreasing sales as well.

I had a whole zoo of - physical - O'Reilly books back in the day. I still own a few today, but they tend to be less language-specific and more 'best practices'-oriented (Hello, 'Bad Data Handbook').

What made me stop was not LLMs, but that I started to get frustrated by every book spending what felt like 20% of its volume on 'how to properly install this' - something that was little value to me (that's the packet manager's job, and I am not screwing up my installation becaue you like that other processor flag more) - while prices rose. Final nail in the coffin was when O'Reilly decided to aggressively push their subscription model. I'm not paying money every month to get access to a library whose books can disappear at will.

I still buy the occasional No Starch Press book.

There are books about languages, and then there are books about timeless truths. The former? Toilet paper. The latter? Treasures. Worth reading:

- Okasaki, Purely Functional Data Structures https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/students/okasaki.pdf

- The Garbage Collection Handbook https://gchandbook.org/

- The Dragon Book - https://faculty.sist.shanghaitech.edu.cn/faculty/songfu/cav/... (yes, it's old, but I still like the end-to-end, all-in-one intro)

- Windows Internals - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/resources/win...

- Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf

- Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/philbe/book/

- Crafting Interpreters - https://craftinginterpreters.com/

- What Every Programmer Needs to Know About Memory - https://people.freebsd.org/~lstewart/articles/cpumemory.pdf (the best thing Ulrich Drepper ever did)

- An Introduction to Modern Cryptography - https://eclass.uniwa.gr/modules/document/file.php/CSCYB105/R...

A good programming book gets better with age. If it's really about ideas and uses this or that technology for exposition, so much the better: the more remote in time the grammar of the examples, the more you can focus on the ideas. SICP being in Scheme is an advantage because you don't know Scheme yet; Windows Internals being about Windows teaches you generally good lessons in OS design by forcing you to contemplate a system alien to the Unix you probably know better.

It's shocking how many of these seminal books are available for free and how few people read them. Yes, yes, you can get the same information from an LLM, but an LLM won't give you the guided tour through the whole rugged ideas-space and show you a reasonable peak. Order, emphasis, and expository style build intuition, so books (especially old ones) are worth reading.

I bought a book on C++20 last year when we started a project on it and I read it.

I don't think programming books are going anywhere, because they still contain a concise directory full of information on different languages or frameworks. If I try to learn a language piecemeal through chatgpt or blogs I risk missing important details or platform-specific knowledge. I'd believe books on vim are going away but books on languages or other job-essential tools have a use in the market and I can't imagine they'll go away.

I still maintain an O'Reilly.com subscription, because it's good to read aan edited book on a topic, and the Google search has just gone to seed.

I do it a lot, now with the time saved by coding agents, I do it even more.