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.

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.

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 :).

> 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...

> 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.

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.

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.

    > 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.

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.

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 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.

This predates LLMs. The internet has been the primary source of programming knowledge for decades.

Books are still good for the fundamentals of course.

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.)

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 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 do feel that programming is more accessible than ever though.

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.

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.

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 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.

The “higher level of abstraction” phrase used to describe what LLMs are in relation to programming… That phrase needs to die.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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 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.

"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...

> 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.

Llm learning fosters mediocrity

> 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'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.

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

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

I do, actually. Trying to find good material to read for Odin programming language. Most books, are just hard to follow, not newbie-friendly, always gushing with bloat, with things that make the book fatter, making it easier to up the price. Student's usually end up paying the price :(

Sol,

Off-Topic: If I suspect that somebody in a company, or message board is tampering with a user's account, when they are not supposed to, say by blocking their ability to login, would legal action against the company in question be justified on the part of the user?

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

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.

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.

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.

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