[roguecoder]

It's 17 years old, dry and contextless. It can be useful, but it'd be way down on the list of books I'd hand to someone and not only because I'm assuming anyone starting out today is programming in Python, Ruby or JavaScript. It certainly isn't necessary reading to be a good programmer, by any means.

[chris_wot]

So what it it's 17 years old? I read it, but it's not contextless, nor is it dry. It has plenty of context - albieit in an older form - the creating of a word processor. You can still grasp this today! In fact, the information on Factory patterns is still used today, same with Singletons and a raft of other items - including Prototypes, which is what Javascript uses.

Please note that I didn't say that I'd provide it to a newbie coder. I merely pointed out that it's not an "antiquated tome". It's very definitely useful, and has been so for some time and remains that way. In fact, I actually think that Zed nailed it on many points in that article.

I find it very interesting that my comment was downvoted merely because someone disagreed. There was nothing inflammatory about my response, nor was there anything factually incorrect. I offered a differing opinion, of which someone decided they would hit the downvote button, instead of doing what they should do - post a response.