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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4723 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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?

SBF was right about books. Sorry bookworms, but they’re obsolete. Every good book should have been either a blogpost or a video lecture.

  • -11

Hardest of disagrees. Books and physical media are more necessary than ever. Digital content can be patched to be censored, edited or even removed, and there's not much you the end user can do about it. Digital book burnings are much easier than physical ones. If the powers that be want to, for instance, hide any evidence that they ever advocated treatment X for condition Y now that it's been found to cause horrible side effects, they can just do it.

and there's not much you the end user can do about it.

Yeah other than downloading it -____-

If you're allowed. And if your app won't auto-update it anyway next time it connects to the internet somehow...

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