Old Books Are Cool Too

Technology moves fast – but sometimes, not that fast. “Old”, outdated books on languages and technology often have valuable insight or content. These books may be a couple years old or a previous edition – or a book from an obscure publisher or author that never received the publicity it deserved. On Amazon.com, these books tend to be cheap and sometimes plentiful. And they are potential treasure chests of information and code.

I have found Amazon.com to be an invaluable resource for these types of books as I explore different programming languages and techniques. Here’s why: Amazon’s reseller program offers tons of books – often used, perhaps a version older – for super cheap. This may not be news for most people out there, but how valuable these books can be to your learning may be.

For example, I’ve found the out-of-print “Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 in C#” By Matthew MacDonald to be an excellent summary of programming ASP.NET in C#, and still widely available. It’s also good for brushing up on Mono’s ASP.NET implementation, too, which is somewhere between 1.1 and 2.0. ASP.NET (actually .NET) is one of those technologies that the basic, foundational skills learned in in “early” versions (Microsoft still supports early versions such as 1.1, “For as long as their clients demand”) are usually very relevent and compatible with later versions, too. And the enterprise installations of early versions of ASP.NET is still incredibly high.

Also, if you increase your skill set by reading code, there is no shame or nothing “inherently wrong” with the code in older versions of books. They can be as relevant as ever and can be good examples to learn from. Legacy code doesn’t update itself – so it pays (literally, sometimes) to know and understand how older code works, too. Speed of adoption can lag behind the latest releases of books, and its likely you will come across older code at some point as a programmer, if not daily or weekly.

I have “old” books I’ve picked up from Amazon.com on subjects as diverse as ASP.NET, C#, PHP, SQL, Python, Linux, Apache, and a handful of other subjects. And many of them have been invaluable references to the code or technology they explain.