albatross
In my home office I have four cardboard boxes packed tight with books. Ninety-percent of them are related to programming: languages, frameworks, best practices, and so on. Some of them are life-changing tomes (Design and Evolution of C++ and Effective C++, to name a few) while others are glorified API documentation, but all have one thing in common: they have not been opened in over four years. The Internet has made them irrelevant.
I still appreciate physical books - the remaining ten percent of my books are focused on consitutional law and American history, and it would not have been nearly as enjoyable to read them had they been e-books[1]. But the fact that I these extracurricular books are packed away just as tightly as their technology counterparts makes it clear that I have little use for books even when they provide content that isn't available on the Internet; the additional books that I've collected since my last move now sit on top of the boxes and will likely be packed away one weekend when I happen to have an extra cardboard box. Having contemplated this situation for a couple of days, I eventually found enlightenment in an old episode of Seinfeld:
Jerry: So that's it? You're out?The books that I own were indispensable during my college years. They drenched my insatiable thirst for knowledge and helped me create the kind of software that was being churned out by real programmers, not just the toy projects that we got for homework. Each semester I would buy my textbooks early, read them, and then spend the rest of the semester learning about the things that weren't covered by RPI's curriculum but seemed really exciting, eventually putting those things to work in side projects that I never seemed to finish. This has led to a situation where all of my books are filled with knowledge that could be considered the foundation of my career or tragically antiquated[2]; either way, these books are just trophies that represent my ability to learn the basic skills required of a professional programmer. All of the new and advanced skills that I use in my day job have been gleaned from the countless tutorials and source code repositories scattered across the Internet.
George: Except for one small problem. I left some books in her apartment.
Jerry: So, go get them.
George: Oh, no. No, I can't go back there. Jerry, it's so awkward and, you know, it could be dangerous... sexually. Something could happen, I'd be right back where I started.
Jerry: So forget about the books. Did you read them?
George: Well, yeah.
Jerry: What do you need them for?
George: I don't know. They're books.
Jerry: What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses like they're trophies. What do you need it for after you've read it?
And they're heavy trophies. When I look back on the last three or four moves I've made, the heaviest and most cumbersome thing to move was always my book collection. It's a chronic back problem waiting to happen, and now that I'm approaching my late twenties, I have to consider these things. The only reason I've looked through my books post-graduation was to find and ship two of them to a friend who was unfortunate enough to be working on a project full of old Win32 code.
Is that what my book collection has become? A used book depository for the handful of programmers that I know? It all seems so wasteful[3]. I think the time has come to get rid of my book collection; as anyone who has visited my past apartments will tell you, I've always been kind of a minimalist, and these books are doing more harm than good here in my office. I will try to give them away to college students and other aspiring programmers, but I have a feeling that many of them will go unclaimed, doomed to the recyling bin.
Of course, I don't think it will matter if I toss all of my books and then forget the ins and outs of the Win32 thread API, but it will matter if I can't articulate why I vote the way that I do or learn from past mistakes; for this reason, the lessons of American history will still have a physical presence in my life. So long as they fit in one box.
[1] I'm not saying that e-books are bad or that they will never be popular - they're just not my cup of tea.
[2] It's sad to look back on all of the books that I had to read just to realize that MFC was a disaster.
[3] And heavy - did I mention that?
Labels: books, career, narcissism
posted by Dan at
4:30 PM
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