[johnfn]

I think you might be giving Spolsky a bit too little credit! I remember the days before SO as well, and while you might luck out by finding your answer in some obscure niche blog, there was a relatively high chance that that error message you were staring at wouldn't have an accessible solution online (or at least not one that Google could provide). You could really just get stuck on a problem for a day, or never find the solution at all and have to work around it otherwise. SO was really a night and day change in how readily accessible it made programming information.

And I really did find myself buying a lot more programming books than I do now. When's the last time you picked up a book just to learn how to use a language - just the ins and outs of the syntax? I used to do that all the time, and then I immediately stopped when SO became popular because I could just google for what I wanted and SO would always tell me.

[necovek]

How people differ: before SO, I've rarely bought language books because most of them had reference pages readily available. I've learned and used heavily all of Python, Perl, PHP, SQL (with MySQL and Postgresql), a bit of assembly (NASM and GNU as), low-level details of C too (from ISO C9x draft), JavaScript, HTML and CSS and plain TeX, not to mention structures of x86 and VBE programming (I played with writing minimal kernels).

This was all before 2001 while I was in high school, with books being very hard to get in Serbia, so internet was my go to resource.

Now to be honest, even after SO, I only use it as a last resort. Somehow only 1/20th of the problems I hit match what people seem to hit on SO :/

[tdeck]

> And I really did find myself buying a lot more programming books than I do now. When's the last time you picked up a book just to learn how to use a language - just the ins and outs of the syntax?

Perhaps this is an age difference thing? I'm 29 - I learned to program between 2003 and 2010 from online resources, mostly in the pre-SO era. I learned BASIC, Perl, PHP, and Python entirely online. My impulse was always to just Google things, although I fully admit finding results was more time consuming and frustrating back then. The only language I learned from a book was FORTH, and that's mainly because it's an older language and Starting Forth is one of the few good resources on the language even today.

[finder83]

I wish I could say my experience matched yours, but SO is an extremely frustrating place for many of my errors and problems. I don't think it made programming worse, it did make it better...but it's far from a panacea, and often a question has answers that are so outdated that the solutions no longer work, the solutions aren't complete or have bugs, or it's close to my error but not the same error, or a different solution. I'd say that's my experience about 1/2 the time I use SO.

I picked up a book last month to learn Clojure...how does SO help to learn a language start to finish? I don't even typically refer to SO for syntax questions, I'm sure it has that information but it doesn't seem like a very convenient place to index it. But maybe that's my subset of languages...

I probably end up on stack overflow a few times a week, and it is helpful...but I'd be fine without it if Google would just return better results.