Originally, I wanted to write a quick blurb about how the coming of the Internet doesn’t negate the importance of reference and learning textbooks. But then today, I had to promptly return a copy of DHTML and CSS Advanced as it merely told me 90% of what I learned via online tutorials and experimentation, and I realized that the subject matter isn’t that clear cut after all.
If you’ve never met a programmer, you might imagine that, being on the forefight of technology, he (forgive me, I only use “he” because it describes 90% of the programming population) would use a combination of online manuals/tutorials, search engines, and maybe a bit of knowledge sharing among peers to get his work done. All the code driving this site – from the backend database management to the interface and the glue that holds them together – I learned from a few select sites and the magic powers of Google. Creators and owners of these technologies have put up extensive manuals on their work for free, and anybody with a bit of free time and an inquisitive mind can be self-educated with much less effort than it used to take (e.g. via sneaking into lectures in universities you weren’t enrolled in).
You might be surprised to find, then, that software engineers value books, guides, tutorials and text in dead tree form just as much, if not more, than what the interweb offers. Two paragraphs ago, I wasn’t sure why this was, but I’ll try to list the positives and negatives per:
- Online material
- (+) Great for starters and learners of a specific technology
- (+) Content constantly updated
- (+) Saves trees, burns electrons
- (+) Searching, cross-site links ease navigational hurdles
- (+) Cheap to create, cheap to consume (as reader)
- (-) Material often lost between cracks of search engines
- (-) Quality uneven, unknown
- (-) Content can be outdated, bad links, no real structure (inherent to the internet)
- Printed material
- (+) Good extensive references
- (+) Quality controlled via editing, small group of authors
- (+) Quality assured via the act of publication: books usually written by field experts
- (+) Easier on the eyes for lengthy reading
- (+) Older books contain gems of knowledge not found on any site
- (-) Reference books can be expensive
- (-) Specific material can be hard to find: requires flipping through physical pages, looking through multiple books, etc.
- (-) Newer content quickly outdated (evident by the URL’s most books refer to nowadays)
Summarizing, online material has a lot of breadth but not a whole lot of depth, and makes going through that breadth easy via searches and links. Printed books provide expert advice and references, but are harder to navigate. In other words, in a very general sense, web tutorials are geared more towards beginners to immediate learners while books target immediate to advanced readers…rationalizing my claim above that professional software engineers value tomes as much as the world wide virtual library.
Ok, back to reading.