« july 31, 2001 - 1:31 ayem | Main | 31 July 2001 - 9:16 am »

I just read a rather depressing thread on slashdot. It was an "Ask Slashdot" piece, and a guy wrote in saying he was in charge of starting a computer book section at his local library and asking what books he should get. Of course, the guy should have realized that this was slashdot, so there was no way he was going to get useful advice. At least that was my take on reading through the posts.

Ask yourself this. Is a person going to the computer section of a library more likely to be interested in a book on how to use Windows, or in Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, a three-volume, not-yet-complete work first started more than 20 years ago? It just seems to me that there will be a hek of a lot more people who want to read about how to use the Start menu in Windows than want to read a theoretical CS book.

Let's approach this from a different angle. Let's try to figure out how many people using the library to get computer books are programmers. First, people who program professionally probably won't be going to the library for computer books, because they can most likely get their employer to purchase books for them. So now the question is whether there are more casual computer users, who only want to send a few emails and type up a Christmas letter in Word, or whether there are more (or at least as many) hard-core computer users, who plan on doing a lot of coding, but don't have their own books. I think it safe to conclude there are more casual users, and have another arguement to support this premise, but I've grown tired of this topic.

This was slashdot after all. I should know better than to expect reasoned posts on most topics. (Just for the record, one or two people voiced the same concerns I'm mentioning here in posts to the thread, but they were easily drowned out by the 650 other posts.)

Posted by on 31 July 2001 at 8:48 AM