I’m fine with old books. Just bought a bunch including “The TCP/IP Guide” and “The Linux Programming Interface”, which are more than a decade old. The oldest is “ The Design and Implementation of the 4.4Bsd Operating System” (30 years).

It’s better starting from an old books and retrace the updates from that. And with the benefits of hindsight, you can get truly good ones cheaply.

I like your reading material. I do think the foundations are to be found in the old texts too, but there are limits to it. Take web development, I honestly think that what Tim Berners-Lee conceived has to be understood because the design goals are in there, however, nothing from the era of IE6 hacks should ever be learned because all of it has to be unlearned if you are to understand the newer toys such as the grid layout that we somehow lived without for so long. That too has fundamentals, design goals and specifications that need to be understood if you are to truly get it.

But now you would have 'how to do grid layout with Claude' or something equally daft. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the book would itself be written with AI.