I personally read books to learn new skills. Why do I choose books instead of searching on the internet?
Nowadays, there are tons of articles on the internet and we probably feel that we can likely learn almost all things there. Internet is a great invention. I utilize it every single day. But are we able to find desired information every time we search? My personal answer is, No.
If the theme that we want is a professional thing in a small community, we can rarely get the info because not many people publish their knowledge.
If the information that we want is too specific or abstract, the search result might not be what we want.
For the first one, there might be no solution to find the info, but for the second one, we might just not know the specific keywords to search. It’s hard to find desired information if we don’t know even the keywords for what we want.
Easy to output our thoughts through a website or SNS
Running a blog became much easier than before because of many useful tools or websites e.g. WordPress, Medium.
The authors don’t have to be familiar with HTML and CSS and hence can focus on writing the contents. In addition to that, Google AdSense offers them an easy solution to earn money from the websites. You probably see advertisements on the contents pages on almost every website.
The authors can earn money as long as the contents give visitors useful information. They can learn something faster by output, earn money, and be said “Thank you for the info!” by the visitors. It sounds great that the authors can be appreciated, stand out and earn money.
Many people start blogging for the merits. I’m one of them.
How reliable and organized is the contents
As I mentioned, it is easy to publish our thoughts on the internet today. It means that the contents are not likely reviewed by someone else. If the website is run by individuals, it is definitely not reviewed.
Visitors hardly see “incorrect” contents because Google doesn’t show the page in a good position. When it comes to programming, there are no incorrect contents as long as the example code works. If it is not a good solution for the problem that we currently have, we can just go to the next website to find another solution.
Those contents are written by both novices and experts. It actually doesn’t matter whether the author is a novice or an expert as long as the contents are useful.
Hmm… It sounds there is no problem learning something only on the internet. It is true when we want to know a solution for a specific problem but I don’t think it is not efficient to learn something only on the internet if we want to know a decent amount of information for a field.
Normally, a book consists of 200 – 300 pages. Therefore, it inevitably handles a bigger theme than an article on the web and lets readers grasp the big picture, and the explanation is well written because it is reviewed by editors. In addition, the contents often start from basics to advance in order to let a reader learn smoothly.
We can see the difference here between books and articles on the web. An article on the web provides a dot for a specific thing, while a book provides a line. What does it mean? A book author determines the target readers of the book and tries to take them to a goal. It provides a bunch of dots towards the goal that is on the same line. Therefore, those dots can easily be connected to each other. A good book provides consistent information with the author’s thoughts that are helpful to let readers step one level up.
Why do I read books to learn something new
As I mentioned at the beginning, proper information can hardly be found if the keywords are not clear because some keywords must be given into a search box. A book provides enough information included what I don’t know. It contains not only a lot of keywords but also some referenced books that the author recommends. My knowledge grows by checking those references.
We need to search many times and read many articles to collect a decent amount of information if we don’t read a book. I think the time to search for something is waste of time. If we have a book for a theme, we can just take and read it without spending extra time. We can learn many things from a book based on consistent thoughts. It’s efficient, isn’t it? It is hard to experience all the contents in the book but we can virtually experience them by reading and considering them.
A book is written and reviewed by experts. It provides solutions with consistent thoughts for a wide range of topics. It’s great to be able to know consistent thoughts for the same theme.
I’ve recently bought 3 books and 2 books arrived. The total number of pages of the two books is more than 1000 pages. It’s taller than a mouse…
I started reading API Design Patterns. I’ve already read 60 pages and the impression so far is very nice. Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures has about 700 pages. It contains lots of information that I don’t know. It will probably take me higher level.
Not many programmers read books
I don’t know how many programmers read at least one book a year.
I’ve created a list of recommended books in my working project because I wanted to know which books other developers recommend. I added my recommended books to the list. I don’t remember how many books there were exactly but I think it was more than 5 books.
There were 7 developers in the project but only one developer added a recommended book to the list. I don’t know why they didn’t add their recommended books. They might not want to spend time on it.
I’m not sure whether they read technical books or not but the truth was they didn’t add their recommendations.
What does it mean? If many developers neither read books nor write code in their private time, their learning curves are gentle because of a lack of experience. In other words, we can be easily better developers than them by reading books. I believe it.
Choose popular and reliable Publisher
You can check the book list that I’ve read on the Author page. I think the quality depends on the publisher. If the editors are competent, the contents likewise become great. I personally like Manning Publications. . All books that I’ve read were easy to read and improved my skills.
If you don’t have your favorite publishers, I recommend you look for books there. They often offer discounts. Don’t miss the chance.
Try to read a technical book if you have never read it yet. I’m sure it helps you out if you meet a good book. Ask your colleagues for their recommendations. Let’s acquire better skills and improve our own project.
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