When I started working corporate in 1999, every engineer had their own library of tech books

I carried around an impressive software engineering personal library, through various jobs and grad school. And it had a few benefits. Even when I was poor and sleeping on the floor because I didn't own furniture, and didn't have health insurance, I'd still buy books (and cheap lunches with the team). I'd also print out a lot of tech docs from the Internet, and put them in discarded binders that I labeled neatly. In addition to what I learned from the books and could reference from my library, there might've also been a signaling benefit. Early in my career, I was a kid with no degree, working as an intern at a hardcore software&hardware engineering company. I suspect that, on occasion, the impressive library signaled to people coming by my work space that at least I had interest/ambition/hustle (or maybe just presumptuousness). Nowadays, the tech industry has way too much signaling, pos…

I still learn and teach (informally) from books. You can find everything online, but there’s something specifically useful about the long form survey or completion of ideas that comes from a well written book as well as the physical reference. I don’t think books are a till I’ll ever take out of my bag. Presently working on getting my feet wet with machine learning and primarily with a book. Of course it’s out of date the second it’s printed with a fast moving topic but it has still been incredibly useful as a survey and basics.

"I have to say, I do sometimes miss learning tech stuff from books. While it's all online and in theory up to date, there is something to be said for the curated experience of a book." I miss the times when you could read K&R, one of Stroustroup's books and an STL book and you pretty much knew most of what there was to know.

> it's all online and in theory up to date yes, and every old version going back, all completely up to those dates too

I still buy books and have a nice little library of tech books. I try to only buy books for things that don’t change much.

I keep 4 shelves of technical books on my bookshelf behind my home office desk. Some are "old," from the 70s. Many were thrifted. And then I have, I don't know, about 300+ pounds of (mostly) technical books in storage boxes in the garage. For technical stuff I prefer to have both physical and digital copies of some books. For non-technical, I tend to go fully digital (except reference material, like my D&D books). I like going analog to read technical stuff, I'm not exactly sure why. Anyway, I believe that reading is a super power that's helped me throughout my life. I try very hard to impress this on others, especially people that I mentor. I've actually been accused of "only knowing" this or that because I "read a lot." Well, no shit, and if others bothered themselves with it they'd learn cool shit, too!

Did you really not miss anything from the physical books? I tend to buy the most highly recommended books for areas I'm interested in, and the quality of explanation and structure routinely beats anything I can find about the topic online. And that's not niche knowledge, goes for undergrad level maths and physics even.

> When I left the company they let me buy my books for $5, so I took them with me, and took them to my next two jobs. I stopped carrying them when everything the contained could be found online. Not just online but also more up to date. This is a drawback of books, they don't auto-update and upgrades are quite expensive. In IT I don't see a point to them anymore.