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Poll HN: How often do you read technical books?

4 points by AgentConundrum ↗ HN
When learning new languages or frameworks, I like to have a good book to learn from. The idea, for me, is that a book will tend to be more reviewed and refined than online tutorials tend to be (though some languages do have really excellent documentation). I also find they're better for reading on a bus or a plane than a laptop might be.

I'd like to know if there's truth to the rumour that tech books are a dying breed, so let's conduct a little survey.

I'd like to define "reading" a book to mean something a bit closer to sitting down with a book, or some sort of study, rather than looking for a quick reference.

So, how often would you say you start reading a new technical book?

6 comments

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AgentConundrum
If I'm missing any important options, let me know and I'll add them. Also, if my choices above are really skewed or inaccurate, I can make a new post with better choices.
_delirium
Hmm, it depends on what exactly you mean. I was going to answer "often", but from the description it sounds like you have in mind the kinds of books that come from technical publishers like O'Reilly, which I read closer to "rarely/never".

For languages, frameworks, tools, etc., I almost never read books. But I do read technical books on concepts, ideas, research areas, techniques, etc. So e.g. in computational statistics / ML, I've never bought/read a book like "R in Action", but I do own "The Elements of Statistical Learning".

AgentConundrum
Yeah, I had something in my head when I went to create this, but in the process of defining it I discovered the question was rather flawed.

I had an idea for a project that rather relied (at least as far as early monetization) on developers preferring to read books, if only as a supplement to online learning.

This would include books like SICP, CLRS, etc., but I thought O'Reilly-type books would be where the most dollars are spent.

There is definitely a market for those books, but it may largely be a "newbie" sort of market, with more advanced developers preferring other methods to acquire knowledge. As a very junior developer, I can't personally see that gap, so I had to ask.

petercooper
I'd like to define "reading" a book to mean something a bit closer to sitting down with a book, or some sort of study, rather than looking for a quick reference.

Reading papers sounds like a gray area there. I don't consider that to be "study" (since some papers can be digested in 15 minutes) but it's usually more informative and demanding than reading an article. If you're into certain branches of computer science, you'll tend to read more papers (and/or journals) than books per se.

AgentConundrum
"[S]tudy," in that sentence, was supposed to mean "studying" rather than a paper. My intent was to separate the sorts of books that you might read end to end from the sort that sit on a shelf until you need to extract some specific piece of information from them.

It's clear to me now that I've done a terrible job of this poll, so perhaps I'll try it again tomorrow with a clearer view and delete this version.

[dead] ItarPeyo
I stopped reading whole books about specific language or technology 5 years ago. But sometimes do buy them to look into a couple of chapters when needed. These kind of books I usually acquire in electronic form as they are easier to use as a reference that way. Plus they tend to get old in a couple of years at which point they'd only serve to gather dust.

Last book about a specific language I read from cover to cover was "Expert Python Programming" which is more about best practices, testing and packaging etc. I feel I learn much more by looking at source code then reading books or tutorials on something.

Books like "Patterns of enterprise application architecture", "Programming collective intelligence", "RESTful Web Services" etc. I do buy and read from cover to cover at least once every quarter.