[alexashka]

What advanced material are you looking for?

A lot of research papers can be found online for free. What problem are you trying to solve that you feel would be helped by advanced material not found in research papers and/or computer science textbooks?

For me, the problems I've encountered that I thought were problems of lack of advanced learning material, have turned out to be problems of absence of tooling, libraries, frameworks and the will to create them.

In my particular case - I became an iOS developer and found out we're still paying people 100k+ to manually create trivial phone apps that fetch trivial database queries via json and display them in rather trivial ways on screens.

You wouldn't believe the number of people working on any given banking app that lets you display your past transactions and transfer money in-between accounts - it's basically a folder/file viewer with pre-defined file types and a couple of pre-defined actions for each. We've had folders, files and transactions to ensure correctness for decades! People are still re-creating these features!

Why do we have separate banking apps that do the exact same thing and why does displaying text fetched from a database and letting you modify it in the most trivial way, a job that pays 100k+ while producing bug ridden code?

There is no book to solve this problem and I believe most of the people employed in software development are churning out or maintaining this type of code. As a result, the market for advanced techniques in computer science is incredibly tiny - if you removed the idiotic whiteboard waterboarding techniques, academia and R&D at big corporations, you'd find out that there is maybe a few thousand people world-wide who are genuinely interested in putting advanced computer science to use.

I'd say this hypothesis explains why we don't have any actual progress in the field, just more javascript frameworks (simplifying, of course ) :) It doesn't explain very well what those billions of dollars in R&D at big corps are accomplishing besides removing ports from laptops and coming up with new keyboard mechanisms that fail when dust falls on them (lol) - maybe we're one day away from a quantum computer that changes everything? I have my doubts :)

[clarry]

> you'd find out that there is maybe a few thousand people world-wide who are genuinely interested in putting advanced computer science to use.

Nah, there are lots of people writing big complex programs with big complex architecture. Architecting programs isn't an "advanced compsci topic", but there are lots and lots of books that don't really talk much about it. Instead they show you how to use your programming language's (or framerwork's, database's, etc.) primitives in a basic way. That's pretty much the things you could just look up in a reference manual. Then you figure out the hard stuff yourself.

They tell me how to hold this bundle of hammer and nails, but I need to figure out how to design a skyscraper with them..

[munificent]

If you haven't read them yet, Design Patterns, The Pragmatic Programmer, and Code Complete, will all help you.

[clarry]

I've glanced at design patterns, but like most programming books, it bored me to death.

To me it reads like "now that you know how to hold this clumsy 90s OOP hammer, here's how to swing it". That's a far cry from architecting systems, and not a particularly motivating read for someone who's really not into that flavor of OOP (or much OOP at all).

[munificent]

I'm trying to think of a tactful way to phrase this, but let me just say it: If you're only willing to learn things that are in convenient, fun-to-consume packages, you'll miss out on a lot of the world's wisdom.

There are a lot of experts who have profoundly deep skills, but don't happen to write in your personally preferred writing style. Do you want that to get in the way of you learning from them? If not, you gotta meet them halfway.

I've learned a lot from well-written books. I've also learned a lot from frankly poorly-written books. Mastery takes work.

[clarry]

On the other hand, life is short, time is finite, and there's more to read and do and learn than any one person can do in a lifetime.

Time and time again I read things only to regret it later because I didn't get my time's worth out of it and probably could've spent that time on something more useful.

It's less a question of style and more a question of content. Do I feel like I'm learning something insightful or important? If not, I start to get bored. If it's a book people recommend a lot, I force myself to keep reading, and tend to get more and more bored. I might or might finish, but in the end I usually regret it. It's very rare for a book that doesn't start out well to do a U-turn and get good towards the end.

[Silhouette]

You make a valid point, and if you're reading fiction for pleasure then your own judgement of the experience is really the only thing that matters. However, if you're reading technical material with the aim of improving your skills, how can you tell whether you are learning something insightful or important?

A classic problem, and the reason that some questionable authors with unreliable content are nevertheless among the most popular in their field, is that the student of a technical subject is by definition never going to be qualified to evaluate tutorial material aimed at their current level. We all rely on the opinions of those more skilled or experienced than ourselves to guide us, at least until we reach a level where there are no more tutorials and instead we're learning from our own experiences including original research and discussions with peers.

In the case of Design Patterns specifically, if you're not into the kind of OOP where those patterns apply then it will have much less value to you. However, I'd say anyone who is working in a language like Java, C++ or C# should have at least passing familiarity with the patterns within and their names, if only to recognise the concepts and key details when they come up in discussion with fellow developers or get mentioned in code or documentation. Some of the ideas behind those patterns are relevant in non-OOP contexts as well, but in other programming styles they are often expressed very differently, which is why I say the book would have much less (but not necessarily zero) value to someone whose interests lie away from class-based OOP.

[Silhouette]

Those are all intermediate/improver kind of books, though. They contain a lot of useful material, and many programmers who haven't studied those subjects would benefit from doing so. However, the ideas would (should) be familiar to any professional programmer with more than a few years of experience. The challenge is where you go after that to continue developing your skills and broadening your experience for the next 5 or 10 or 20 years, rather than becoming the "eternal novice" who is proficient with the basic tools but unaware of more advanced idioms or more strategic issues that would help them to produce much better work.

[ghaff]

I suspect that, in many cases, books are most useful for people starting out because they don't know what they don't know and don't know what they really should know. Once you're more experienced, you probably care about deep dives in specific areas that may not even be of much general interest and may be very recent. And those are probably less amenable to books.