/λ/ - programming

This is what the market wants. Most of programming books are aimed for normal people who never programmed in their life and this is fine… I myself started that way. If you want to learn a certain technology just 'read the docs'. I'm not very well read so it's hard to say, but it seems like there is a good book in every domain of computer science so there is something good for everyone I guess.
This seem like a good recommendation list: https://teachyourselfcs.com/

>>1644
I was thinking about books aimed at professionals, not the "Beginner Python" and "Learn XY in 24 Days" types. Do you think programming books are so dumbed down because most software professionals remain at beginner levels for their entire career?

>>1645

I think a lot of it is that there is very little actual mastery going on of specific technologies now. People are asked to build large codebases that use a stack of upwards of 8-12 components sometimes. All written or using different frameworks or languages. So it isn't that modern programmers are bad, but that they are streched thin. Think back to the 80s or something, back then you would learn one programming language and several of its libraries over the course of 10 years, These guys would literally use C and nothing else or COBOL and nothing else for 10 years. You don't get this anymore, everyone is expected to know everything and work on everything all the itme. Nobody ever has the time to actually sit and really deeply learn something and experience something as fully anymore. I think the books are just a reflection of this. People aren't given enough time before they have to context switch to working on another component of the stack. I have like 20+ things on my resume that I have extensive work history with, but how many would I claim mastery over? Almost none. Books reflect this weird issue in terms of how they are written, that is why they contrast so sharply with 80s and 90s programming texts.

>>1646
Hmmm, you might be right, I did not consider this.

It's not just recent books. If the only books you can name from the 80s and 90s are the good ones then your perspective is colored by survivor bias. As for why so many books are trivial, it's because it's hard work to make anything else. It's easy to write a feature-centric book that supplements existing documentation which is what a lot of non-introductory books are. And there's real demand for these books.

>>1650

This is a great point that other people haven't mentioned. If I wrote a advanced book on how to develop a large semi-specific project and use libraries to do so, I would be working for almost nothing.

By this I mean, if my choice is to make 100k working at a company on a project over the course of a year. VS, I make maybe 20k max on a book doing the same programming work BUT with the added cost of doing a writeup about said work? I'm losing money, big time. This is probably a good incentive for why books only often have simple examples. It doesn't pay well enough to create large extensive ones.

>>1655
Couldn't they just use Free Software?

>>1656
What? It's about opportunity cost.

>>1657
Right, but instead of developing their own complex examples, they could just point to examples in publicly available source code. I don't think I've ever seen anyone do that. Is there a legal reason for it?

>>1663
No, but real world source code is rarely ideal for teaching. Even if the code isn't drowning in error handling or domain specific knowledge, it's probably not a very concise illustration of any lesson from any book. The only book I know of that makes heavy use of real code is TCP/IP Illustrated.

>>1663

Its often also useful to make up programming languages that kinda-sorta look like real world languages, but with some simplifications. See The Art of Computer Progamming. Various hardware architecture books will often make up simplified assembly languages to demonstrate some point about how or why something works the way it does.

>>1644
Do you happen to know more of such sites that have recommendation lists?
Maybe even for programming books themselves even though I have understood the part with most of them being very similar to each other.

>>1677
Here's one with a focus on hard/theoretical CS:

https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum/