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pier4r · 10-10-2022, 05:10 PM

(09-25-2022 06:36 PM)Dave Britten Wrote: I lament how much more difficult it's become to find good technical books (database systems, development, etc.) compared to 10 years ago.

I think that nowadays there are some forces against good technical books (at least in IT).

1. The book may become quickly obsolete due to changing tech stack, therefore authors are pressured to publish quickly and not to polish their work.
2. There is the expectation to find everything quickly. Stack overflow dominates (also for some good reasons), therefore the book won't be appreciated or used that much. That could mean that the author doesn't really put a ton of effort in it. I can access to a lot of IT books through safari books online and I can tell you that between searching there and searching online with google, hands down I find the answer in less time on google most of the time. Unfortunately I cannot really justify much "going through a lot of books to find the answers" to the customers. Customers aren't young people, are pretty senior (40, 50+) and still they expect everything yesterday like my daughter (2) does. One cannot expect much quality under constant time pressure.
3. In the last years people prefer to use video tutorials or readily available articles (that is, no paywall), rather than buying books that may or may not be helpful. Thus again there is not much support to make a quality book.

A decade ago there was plenty of information too online, but it was less widespread or organized (stack exchange, quora, reddit all exploded around 2012-2014) so books were still somewhat authoritative.

Instead I would expect books on subjects that move not at a too quick pace, for example self management, time management, organization, lessons learned (in terms of organization in the group) and so on to be still ok. For example lots of chapters in the "the practice of systems and network administration" from 2007 are still valid today because they don't focus on technical tools that may become obsolete.

Or books about design patterns and what not.