[Theodores]

I have just been looking for a book on O'Reilly, of an existing tech, but I am not sure that tech really matters because AI has taken over in ways that do not interest me.

With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+.

The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ.

Dunning Kruger springs to mind.

Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere.

Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up.

This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them.

After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy.

In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.

[skydhash]

I’m fine with old books. Just bought a bunch including “The TCP/IP Guide” and “The Linux Programming Interface”, which are more than a decade old. The oldest is “ The Design and Implementation of the 4.4Bsd Operating System” (30 years).

It’s better starting from an old books and retrace the updates from that. And with the benefits of hindsight, you can get truly good ones cheaply.

[Theodores]

I like your reading material. I do think the foundations are to be found in the old texts too, but there are limits to it. Take web development, I honestly think that what Tim Berners-Lee conceived has to be understood because the design goals are in there, however, nothing from the era of IE6 hacks should ever be learned because all of it has to be unlearned if you are to understand the newer toys such as the grid layout that we somehow lived without for so long. That too has fundamentals, design goals and specifications that need to be understood if you are to truly get it.

But now you would have 'how to do grid layout with Claude' or something equally daft. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the book would itself be written with AI.

[skydhash]

I separate my learning into “understanding/” and “skill”, the latter being the applied form of the former. I don’t really buy books for the latter, and the former may not be always in book form.

IE6 hacks are skills. The real understanding is how CSS helps with layout. Grid may not be in an old book, but the old will give you enough foundation to easily grasp it. So something like “CSS in Depth”[0] (which talks about grid BTW) is a good candidate to buy.

I think you can get good materials if you focus on getting books that talks about a system (design, theory, implementation), not techniques(skills, how to). Systems evolve and are build on top of each other, or influence each other. Skills come and go.

[0] https://www.manning.com/books/css-in-depth