Re: What's up with C++ (books)?

On Friday 27 May 2011, Jared Richardson wrote:

> I've worked in Java and Ruby, but I'm currently working alongside two
> C++ teams. They're smart people, but I've never met a more
> not-book-buying-bunch in my life. They rarely go to conferences,
> don't read blogs and don't keep up on the "latest greatest" cool
> stuff. They're generally keeping up on the latest chipset errata
> from Intel or AMD, or tinkering with new DSPs, or...
> 
> I don't mean to disparage them, because as I said before, they're
> very smart, but they also remind me of the "tribal knowledge"
> culture that I saw in programming in the 90s. They talk to each
> other to learn a lot more than they buy books... and they spend a
> lot of time heads down, writing and debugging.

That fits in with Dave's comment that no one asks them (i.e. Pragmatic 
Bookshelf) for C++ books.

My experience over the past 10 to 15 years has been that of the people I 
directly work with hardly anyone reads or even buys books. OTOH, this 
has not been true for online discussions.

So, all in all, the best I can make of this is that only relatively few 
people read and buy books. And those few apparently have moved on from 
C++ to other languages. Apart from sounding sensible, is there any 
evidence?

Michael

-- 
Michael Schuerig
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/


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