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Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

If $100 seems like a meaningless amount of money to you, then nothing I say here will make you understand what it feels like when that's practically an infinite amount of money. I've been on both sides of this and it's pretty hard to understand one side from the point of view of the other.

I hope you'll just take my word for it that $100 is not a meaningless amount of money to most people.

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This is one of the reasons that public libraries are so important. It's still true that textbooks are a good investment even for the very poor - $100 is less than 15 hours at minimum wage, and you'll learn more from 35 hours of studying a good textbook than 50 hours of studying a bad one. But part of the crushing burden of poverty is that it prevents you from making good investments. It doesn't matter how much time that $100 investment will save in the future if there's just no way you can spare the money now. So we as a society should be doing whatever we can to give people access to these resources.

part of the crushing burden of poverty is that it prevents you from making good investments

Exactly.

A car might be a better use of your time than three buses. Too bad. You can only afford the buses.

Some strong work boots would be a better investment than these cheap knock-offs. Too bad. I only have enough money for the knock-offs.

Paying my parking tickets would be a lot smarter than ending up in court. Too. Bad. I don't have $30 to pay them.

An underestimated aspect of this is the fuck it factor. So maybe I get the $30 to pay the tickets? So what? It's just going to be something else tomorrow. So, fuck it; I'm having a beer.

As I understand it, the minimum effective (federal) tax rate is 10%, so it'd be less than 16 hours - not 15?

Yeah... As a college student with student loans, rent, utilities, and $30 a week for food, there's not much more room in my budget for books. If I read a medicore free textbook and learn something, that's more than I learned from the $50 textbook that I couldn't buy.

Do you own a smartphone?

A $350 or less smartphone provides more value than three or four $100 textbooks any day.

Depends what do you use smartfone for. Most people use it for facebook and mindless browsing. You can do that less comfortably on cheaper phone.

What? Look at the price of Nexus devices for example. Those things are well powered enough to do anything your flagship can.

Does your university has library?

Being unable to afford the books and software needed to learn programming was actually why I had started contributing to open-source (after I did finally learn).

I had learned just before Linux had started gaining prominence. If it wasn't for a cheap "Learn C++ in 24 hours" book with a free non-commercial copy of Borland C++ 5.02 I'd likely have not been able to really learn programming at all, at least until I later went to college. I'll note that the book itself was essentially useless; it was the .hlp file included with BC++ documenting a subset of the Win32 API that helped me along.

Things are much better now for aspiring (but poor) programmers. But they can be better still, and the cost of learning materials are certainly a key part of that.

In addition, it's far from clear to me that price correlates to quality with textbooks. In much the same way as a good junior professor or even grad assistant may actually be a better teacher than a well-known professor.

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