
Coding Horror: Programmers Don't Read Books -- But You Should - graywh
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001108.html
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michael_dorfman
I agree with the article, but am skeptical of his taking a pass on Knuth-- I
think that working through TAOCP is a good investment for anyone serious about
programming (given sufficiently large values of "serious").

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jrockway
Agreed. But remember, this is Jeff Atwood... I doubt his readers do much other
than 1) submit his blog to reddit and 2) write Visual Basic applications.

Not exactly what I would consider "being a programmer", but to each his own, I
suppose.

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raganwald
"I doubt his readers do much other than 1) submit his blog to reddit and 2)
write Visual Basic applications."

I agree with point #2, and perhaps he does as well. He has said much the same
thing, openly, and he has also said that his mission is to provoke them into
hoisting themselves up a little beyond that.

I apologise for the terrible analogy, but perhaps Jeff's blog is like a car's
first gear. It exists to overcome a large amount of inertia and get an object
at rest to start moving, slowly. Other gears take it from there.

I personally wish he would push them to explore towards more free software and
tools rather than stay on the Microsoft plantation, but if he can get anybody
to read just one more book this year, the essay is a win.

Heck, if it can remind me that _I_ need to read one more book this year, it's
a godsend for me.

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mlinsey
I think that a well-written language specific book can be much better than the
internet, because they can take you from the beginning through advanced
concepts in a structured way. This means you can really see how everything
fits together, why the language developed the way it did, and how to do things
the "right" way.

One example of this is "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide" (the Rhino book). In
some respects this is exactly the kind of book that the article is
criticizing: it's huge, it tries to be a reference book, it's specific to a
single technology, it's about something that real programmers should be able
to figure out on their own. But it was much quicker to read it than to try and
make sense of the scores of tutorials out there that each explain one small
part of the language. Yeah, I could have all figured it out anyway, but that
doesn't mean it would have been the best way to do it.

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comatose_kid
Never take programming advice from a guy who still has books on 'BASIC
computer games'.

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Tichy
BASIC Computer games are cool, but "Moving to VB.NET"???

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hello_moto
He might need to port code from VB to VB.NET. It's his problem by using VB6 at
the first place.

Heck some people probably have books like "Rails for PHP developers" or "Rails
for Java developers" or "Moving to Rails" (if exist).

