Apparently the guy who wrote the Camel book on Perl made less than $1000 from that book. I was shocked when I heard about that because back in the day when I was learning that book was incredibly popular and seemed to be everywhere.

EDIT: Edited, not wrote. My bad. That's a crucial distinction. Also, I meant the Llama book, not the Camel book.

> Unfortunately even in the old days, a truly good programming book like you’re describing was depressingly rare.

And when you got past the beginner stuff, non existent.

I've randomly tried to improve my $LANGUAGE_I_ALREADY_SHIPPED_SOMETHING_IN knowledge across the years, but if you look at books there's a plateau, and it's not too high.

With the internet, there are random posts here and there with pieces of info that will help you improve yourself. But no books.

Agreed, Books on specific programming language were indeed tricky.

I found books on architecture, systems, or patterns, were more available. E.g. On relational database optimization principles, or Unix system administration, or graphics algorithms and rendering math, etc :)