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

Younger me really enjoyed some of the game programming books by Andre Lamothe.

Most “Learn Language X” books were terrible with over focus on syntax and very little thought into organization.

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.

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sriram_malhar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s not true. I wrote the Panther book, Advanced Perl Programming, and easily made way more than 100k. Of the 25-30 or so dollars the books cost, I got 10% per copy, or $2 after taxes. The first print run of 35000 sold within the first three weeks.

The Camel book was already a huge bestseller, and was one of the anchor books of the early OReilly series. It made Larry a pretty penny

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smallerize an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The 4th edition authors included brian d foy, who said "I think Tom [Christiansen] and I worked for about two years to produce the current edition. I certainly wouldn't want to spend that much time again to make less than $1,000... It's a huge effort from the editors and proofreaders and the book won't sell enough to make back the effort they put into it." https://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/1ns5r9n/comment/ngmvt...

	▲	sriram_malhar 33 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I wasn't aware of this. The first edition came out in 1991. The 4th ed came out in 2012, by which time Perl was no longer the duct tape of the internet. Perl 6 had muddied the waters, and Ruby and Rails had peaked. Still, 1000 is painfully low, esp. for a high quality product.
	▲	wyclif an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, you're right. That is the comment I was referring to.

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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NikolaNovak 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 :)