[TheAceOfHearts]

I love textbooks, it feels like it should be the ideal for passing on a lot of crystalized knowledge to the next generation. But many tech books are just dealing with flavor of the month tools to help you be reasonably proficient, and they quickly become outdated in months / years. I think the financial incentives are also fairly limited; nobody is getting rich from writing a technical textbook.

Sometimes there are books which have become the standard for some domain, but they were written from an older perspective which is no longer as true for the modern era. I've heard it claimed that the dragon compiler book is a good example of this, focusing too much on limiting memory usage at the cost of speed.

Another problem is the limited collective curation efforts. There's tons of these "awesome list of things", but they give you a flood of options instead of picking out the best ones. This is a problem because people probably aren't enthusiastic to read multiple books on a topic, and there's an ever growing mountain of content to sift through.