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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

> I don't read programming books any more because they are mostly shit or expensive or expensive and shit.

That’s consistent with the first reason given in the article:

> I lay part of the blame squarely at the feet of the technical book publishing industry:

> Most programming books suck. The barrier to being a book author, as near as I can tell, is virtually nonexistent. The signal to noise of book publishing is arguably not a heck of a lot better than what you'll find on the wilds of the internet. Of the hundreds of programming books released every year, perhaps two are three are truly worth the time investment.

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I’m the author of Learning Go from O’Reilly, so I might be a bit biased.

What I’ve found is that different publishers put different amount of effort into producing good content. O’Reilly is almost always excellent. Others are less so.

It’s hard to find a dev who is willing to invest a year of their life to write a book that is likely to make almost no money. It’s doubly hard to find devs who write well.

Given these filters, two or three good programming books a year sounds pretty great.

what a coincidence!

i am reading your book now and thoroughly enjoying it!

Learning Go's quite good to get dangerous with Go quickly, so good job!

The problem is that they're written by developers. And when I say developers I mean developers, not engineers or authors. Everything is about a sausage factory, nothing more. You don't learn stuff other than copying and mimicry. And some of it is absolute monkey excrement. But when you don't know better it feels like you are learning something good.

I am considering writing a bad programming book on purpose. I will call it "how to sling together a badly written Go 'enterprise' app and smear AngularJS over the top"

Nah, the worst ones are the ones written by authors, but who aren't developers. Especially the ones that are authors that just write a book for every new trendy language but never get to the point of actually using those languages themselves.

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