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Is it just me, or is the market for computer books dying?
I usually check libgen when I need to research a new topic, and it looks like the usual suspects like O'Reilly, Manning, Wiley and Apress just don't bother publishing anything anymore. A lot of the books haven't been updated since 2017 or so, even though the latest major version of the software in question was released in 2020.
Have piracy and Packt killed the market for good computer books for good? Will I have to read random Medium articles for the rest of my career to stay up-to-date?
These days I mostly dive straight into the technical documentation or the source code of whatever I am reading up on.
In the past these would have been reference books. But freely published technical documentation is better since they can be easily updated.
I do feel this state of things is sad since it removes a straight forward source of monetization for good technical writers, despite being objectively better.
In the absence of good docs or easily readable source code I start looking up blogs. Now, depending on the domain you may end up with a lot of blogspam, but as long as you search via HN, lobste.rs or a relevant subreddit you can do fine.
Textbooks/Research papers still have their place for more theoretical topics that do not become outdated as fast, but it is less than it was in the past.
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