
Read The Dinossaurs - duck
http://philcalcado.com/2011/12/29/read_the_dinossaurs.html
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DanielBMarkham
To contrast, here's my review of the same book: <http://www.hn-
books.com/Books/The-Mythical-Man-Month.htm>

I remember reading somewhere that Thomas Jefferson was disappointed with the
way public opinion had changed between when the Declaration of Independence
was written and when the Constitution was formed. He said something to the
effect of "12 years ago everybody thought we had awesome ideas, but now they
all want something new because after all, those ideas are 12 years old and
certainly something newer and better has come along by now."

When I started hn-books, I wanted to go on a tour of the classics -- all the
dinosaurs. It was a great ride I had doing this last year! I miss it and want
to do some more. I would advise everybody who is a serious reader to make a
resolution to read a dozen or so of the classics in programming and technology
creation in the coming year. You won't regret it.

The downside is that I found I lost tolerance for a lot of new work. I'd read
some kind of self-help programming book and think "Oh, the author got that
idea from over here." and "Yeah, he picked that up from X, but he really
doesn't understand how to apply it"

There's some real self-congratulatory crap out there. Two hundred pages of
book with 3 ideas in it, all copied from some greater writer. If that's the
way you need to absorb it -- all nice and fluffy and with the code all in the
cool language of the day -- then more power to you. But I've found it's just
as easy to read the dinosaurs, get a firm understanding of where the ideas
come from, and then have a little better foundation and perhaps more
interesting observations to make.

Programming is programming. The tech is changing tremendously fast, but the
job is the same as it was 30 years ago. The part about what bit 7 needs to be
on a new technology stack, how Google got super-scaling to work, and whether
the standards body will approve Y next year is important, but it is _really_
overrated. You'll learn far more from the dinosaurs in a month than from
consuming that stuff everyday online. </rant>

