Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

CharlieDigital

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.

thedangler

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

MathMonkeyMan

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.

sputknick

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.

geophph

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.

fartfeatures

Nobody uses a horse and cart as an every day method of commuting anymore.

corvad

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

markus_zhang

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.

ddoolin

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 I also think they are better for foundational knowledge; many times the books become outdated very quickly.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.

eterm

> 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...

NikolaNovak

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 :).

clasplock

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.

matrix87

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

RickJWagner

My career kicked into high gear some time around 2008. I saw somewhere online where a publisher was seeking a volunteer book reviewer / junior editor. I volunteered, did the best job I could, and posted an honest review via blog. I got more review requests, and a few other publishers contacted me for the same. I didn’t really master much, because I didn’t put hands on keyboard for a lot of it. But I got a good view of the technical landscape, and I accumulated a nice paperback library. Before too long, the free books became free ebooks and some of my contacts needed renewing as natural career progression took place. I let my ‘hobby’ die off as I dug deeper in the topics that interested me. So that era passed. I still have several books with my name in the credits, sort of a souvenir set from the time.

nritchie

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.

Legend2440

This predates LLMs. The internet has been the primary source of programming knowledge for decades. Books are still good for the fundamentals of course.

oftenwrong

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.

dangus

Disregarding the issue of AI for a moment, I don’t really think books were ever the ideal way to learn programming. It’s so obviously better to learn programming in a web based medium. Not just for tutorials or code-running environments, but also for having up-to-date manuals and references for tooling as new releases come out. Or, if you don’t like that, e-books are again vastly superior with the ability to search easily without flipping through indexes, copy/select text, etc. Books become out of date so fast, and you live in a hell of manual transcription, which is not actually that helpful for learning despite being highly manual. I also remember dealing with typos and mistakes that were hard to fix as a new learner. Let’s hope someone sent a letter to the author and that the book sold well enough to get a second edition, which I’d then have to buy…but by then it was too late, I’d have moved on. There was a huge bookshelf because there was no better option. Just like Blockbuster video, something far better came around.

adfm

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.

aboardRat4

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.