Do not read books. Read articles, blogs, online forums, read those things that convey the essence and which you can leave feedback. This thesis is relevant for 2018. In the future, the first part (about books) is likely to remain relevant. But about the articles and blogs are not sure.

However, the question is: why not read books? It's not for nothing millions of flies A lot of people brag about "I read the book XXX", and then ask "what books have you read today?" Well, not for nothing that there are articles like " How to read 40 books a year ," " 7 things about books and life that I learned after reading 100 books a year, " and so on.

And the answer is in the time in which we live. After all, this thesis (especially about blogs) would be more likely erroneous at the beginning of the XIX century.

0. People choose reading books thoughtlessly, simply because they said

Books were practically non-alternative source of knowledge before. Yes, there was a radio (including word of mouth), there was an experience that was transmitted from mouth to mouth. However, the accumulated knowledge could be found only in books. Where in the XX century the engineer will find a table of densities of materials? In the book. And where will the student find the rationale for GR? In the book. Where does the average person read in plain language about the story? In the books.

The whole basis of knowledge used to be in the books. Writing a book was an incredible honor. Remember the teachers who were the authors of the books. This was directly emphasized (in school, in high school). We get the important rules of the XX century:

• Reading books is synonymous with absorbing knowledge.
• Writing a book is incredibly prestigious.

However, now (let me remind you once again - this text is relevant for 2018 ) everything has changed (again, the IT people are to blame):

• Knowledge you will find on the Internet. In addition, immediately, but also from different sources, with evidence and so on.
• It is even easier to write a book; it is not necessary to be an honored academician or writer. And you no longer need to be persistent (remember that there is a correlation between success and persistence).
• In addition to the ease of typography: modern publishers have realized that it is often not the content of the book that is important, but the advertisement through which the book will be sold. This is a serious difference from the USSR.

That is, if someone advises you to study the algorithms of the books, then this person rather drew knowledge 10 years ago from books, and he did not feel that the world had changed. Books are no longer monopolists for the storage of knowledge . Books are not the only source of useful information, as it was before. This is analogous to the fact that the phone is now not the only means of remote voice communication . Ordinary mail is not the only way to transfer an image .

1. In books it is too easy to embellish, keep back, or just to blatantly lie

If you are reading a book, you know very well that:

• There are often hundreds of pages in a book.
• The list of links is rather poor and takes only a few percent of the total.
• Moreover, according to my subjective notes, the closer to the end, the more the author begins to replace the facts and logic with the authority of the writer. As an example, flick through the book Psychological Hospital in the Hands of Patients or the Mythical Man Month .

Have you ever been surprised that in the articles on Wikipedia, in scientific articles, as well as in articles on Habré a much higher frequency of references to facts? It would seem that difficult - to reinforce every fact with a link?

Here is the text from the first chapter of the book Mythical Man-Month (following the link - page 11):

From time to time, you can read in the newspaper about how a couple of programmers in a refurbished garage made a wonderful program that left behind the development of large teams. And each programmer willingly believes in these fairy tales, because he knows that he can create any program with a speed far exceeding those 1000 operators per year that programmers in the industrial teams reportedly write.

Tell me, what from this text is an indisputable fact? Was it difficult for the author to add a link to become a newspaper? And on "every programmer willingly believes in fairy tales" and so on? There are practically no references in the books, because if you back up every fact with a reference, the arguments of the author of the book will obviously be false . In the case of a book, the reader will not be able to object to the author in the comments; the reader can only close the book after the first paragraph. Well, or start to believe, because faith sometimes begins with a book .

Admit it, do you subscribe to each phrase in the paragraph above? Or would you recommend using the words “some programmers” instead of “every programmer”?

I will repeat part of the thesis: read articles, blogs, forums in the network, read those things that convey the essence and which you can leave feedback. In the books you do not write a comment, you do not carp. And the author knows this very well. The author can always come up, embellish. Gonzo journalism has appeared in offline issues, where it is impossible to write that the facts are wrong.

In articles on Habré, the author knows that a comment will arrive at any false lunge. Because articles with frank lies rarely appear. Moreover, as a reader, I know that a lot of mistakes will be corrected thanks to feedback, which is not found in offline articles. Example: in the material about MikroTik RB2011, the author made an error about IPSec, which was quickly corrected by good Maloi3390 .

Another example is the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's GULAG Archipelago . Let me remind you that this author himself calls this novel "The Experience of Artistic Research," in order to immediately point out the lack of documentation in it. And now the facts:

• In Wikipedia (that in Russian , that in English ) is still being discussed an article about the Gulag. The numbers are verified, there are sources and so on.
• On the public website lurkmore there is a discussion of Alexander himself, the facts are verified and corrected.
• There is no discussion of numbers in the book itself. The author gives them out with sparing links to sources, often embellishing.

We get that in comparison with online publications with feedback, books have much less certainty .

2. The sunset of the old journalism is coming. Writers used to write, now experts

And the most interesting - who writes books, who writes magazine articles and who writes articles on topics on the Internet?

In order not to delay the discussion, theses:

• most of the non-trivial articles on the Internet are written by experts and eyewitnesses, while the majority of journal articles and books are written by writers
• the specialist does not want to pour water into his research, he will write the essence. The journalist is paid for the symbols and scandals, he pours water

Yes, no one argues that there are books from experts (albeit rather memoirs). And there are online articles written by people who only retell the words of experts. And there are bloated articles in the subject of which are “MK programming”, and in the text - “what a bad middle manager”.

In the description above, the word "non-trivial" should be interpreted as "having at least the minimum information value for the reader." The word is necessary to cut off the empty publications in the style of me and my cat . For example, articles from Drebin893 about moving to Germany and from sith about electric vehicles were non-trivial for me, since I learned something new and valuable for myself.

However, the list for comparison:

• Techie lozga writes about space, about the technical topic. Not journalist Latynina, with literary education , and techie. Therefore, blunders less.
• Milfgard gives advice on running a retail business. He himself is doing this, he tells. In contrast, the well-known investment writer Robert Kiyosaki, the author of books on investing , turned out to be a poor investor in reality, and he started to use fixed capital as a writer. For which he is criticized .
• The writer Martin Fowler (you remember the book about refactoring ) in github assume that there is no code . The biography does not even list the projects where he worked. But it is written about his books. In another way - one of the most famous authors of books on programming is not known as a programmer . In contrast, the citizen of DreamWalker just has a repository on github, moreover - he managed to make useful for many - BenchmarkDotNet .

The list goes on and on, but it turns out incredibly surprising - a huge number of authors of famous books became famous only as authors of famous books . The maximum of their achievements is work in a large corporation. We can not in any way assess how generally you can trust their experience.

However, in the books of these "authors" there is a greater flaw - this is a bloated narrative. For comparison - if you read the story False Blindness , then remember the amount of text that told about the Chinese room. Compare with Wikipedia article .

Writers like to pay for the volume of what is written - see how Amazon’s example will pay authors of books for how many pages their books are read by the buyer . On the contrary, the specialist who writes the article wants to convey the essence as briefly as possible .

What is the conclusion?

Briefly: read articles, blogs, forums in the network, read those things that convey the essence and which you can leave feedback. Do not read books.

Do not take in information from sources that you cannot simply accuse of deception. They have no incentive to verify references to evidence. On the contrary, they have a great temptation to embellish a problem, to lift themselves, to advertise their next works.

Try to get first-hand information from specialists, not from writers. You are not the XIX century, now almost everyone can write an article.

Skip content in which the author is not responding. You should have a dialogue with the author, you, as a reader, should have the opportunity to ask a question, correct a mistake. No need to communicate with the authors "on Olympus", they will not give anything useful.

I would be very happy if you write in the comments both the agreement with the article and references to the opposite (research, etc.). Still, the main thing in this article is to submit and try to substantiate the idea that the world has changed, and the sacral meaning has disappeared in books.