Web design books over 10 years old - worth keeping?

[Clariman]

Hi,

When Stooz and I set up our first website at stoozing.com he did the tech work, but I taught myself Javascript and wrote the online calculators that are now on here too financecalculators/ . I haven't touched the code in years.

I'm having a clear out at home and came across 2 books which I bought at the time. They are now over 10 years old. So my question is .... should I ever get into the technical side again in a few years time, are these books going to be so out of date that they will be a waste of time .... or might they still be useful.

• Learning Web Design 3rd Editon by Jennifer Niederst Robbins, pub O'Reilly 2007
• Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Appache All in One 3rd Edition 2007

I see the first one (3rd Edition) can be bought on Amazon for 0.01p so that may be my answer

Thanks
C

[MikeyWorld]

PHP & MySQL are not likely to go out of fashion, though they are far easier to learn now that you can download Mamp/Wamp.

JavaScript is still useful. It provides the alternative to PHP / MySQL stuff. "MEAN" workflow using Mongo DB is fully JavaScript.
AJAX which updates portions of pages without having to refresh the whole page is (Asyncronous) JavaScript.

If you understand JavaScript, then Python, ActionScript, and Swift are very similar. Everything these days is drag and drop, mobile first etc, but you've still got the same JavaScript & PHP lurking in the background.

I've not looked at the books, and I've not done any of this stuff for a while, but I wouldn't get rid of them. Wait until next March, you may need them to light the kindling under your black market tin of beans.

[kiloran]

Hi,

I'm having a clear out at home and came across 2 books which I bought at the time. They are now over 10 years old. So my question is .... should I ever get into the technical side again in a few years time, are these books going to be so out of date that they will be a waste of time .... or might they still be useful.

• Learning Web Design 3rd Editon by Jennifer Niederst Robbins, pub O'Reilly 2007
• Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL and Appache All in One 3rd Edition 2007

I see the first one (3rd Edition) can be bought on Amazon for 0.01p so that may be my answer

Thanks
C

My modus operandi when learning a new programming language is to buy a book to read through at my leisure, then having got the basics into my brain, use Google to solve any particular problem like syntax, etc.
So if you already have the core knowledge from the books in your head, then dump them and use Google to solve any problems.

--kiloran

[UncleEbenezer]

PHP & MySQL are not likely to go out of fashion, though they are far easier to learn now that you can download Mamp/Wamp.

Well, you've been able to download those a lot longer than ten years.

I have some long-outdated books, but only 'cos of my hoarding tendencies. Reluctant to throw them out when *someone* might have a use for them.

A sensible question to ask of any of these books: would you buy it today? Is it a good book? Good enough to hold its own in spite of the parts that have inevitably become outdated? A ten-year-old book on clientside technologies would be a lot more outdated than one on serverside stuff which - if well-written - could still serve to give its reader a leg up the steep bit of the learning curve.

[superFoolish]

I'd get rid of them.

I hate disposing of books, and had a massive collection of technical books before I left the UK for Australia 7 years ago. That was my opportunity to 'let them go' (and it was painful). I kept about half-a-dozen technical books, and haven't bought any since. Probably half of those books aren't worth keeping now (I'll have a look later today). The ones I have kept include SQL programming (one of the best technical books I have ever read - nearly 20 years-old now); at least 50% of which is perfectly valid today, and also some Excel books - the Excel GUI has changed, but almost all the information about formulas and best-practice is still valid. Having said that, I haven't picked any of those up for a couple years, so maybe it's time to let them go too.

I never buy paper books now, and I am a technical write and trainer and have even had my own technical book published ('properly' published; still get a few quid in royalties more than 5 years later!), but I do all my reading on-line.

I also used to be a major magazine buyer and hoarder; I had subscriptions for at least half-a-dozen monthly IT magazines, and it got to the point where I forced myself to keep only the previous 12 months' issues of each, plus a handful of 'specials'. Again, the move to Australia solved that problem - got rid of the lot! I bet I have not purchase more than a dozen magazines in the last 7 years (and half of those were when I purchase several consecutive issues of Wired). No more - I read everything online!

I do not particularly enjoy reading technical books in any ebook format (e.g. Kindle); they're never formatted correctly, and not easy to bookmark / flip between pages, but information on the web is so readily available, that this is not a problem when information is needed. The only time I read technical ebooks is, as kiloran has mentioned, when learning a technology, it's handy to read a book on the topic pretty-much from start-to-finish, but I'd rarely reference it again.

I remember the days when you frequently had to buy several technical books just to solve a single technical issue. I had to buy 3 or 4 large, expensive books, just to solve a couple of issues I had when developing a Pocket PC application (oh, those were the days!).

[Itsallaguess]

I used to buy quite a few technical programming books, and still do buy the odd one but that's a very rare occasion nowadays.

I find that Google-fu is one of the single best skills that anyone can learn nowadays, and it really is a skill that can be learned and taught, and it can help enormously with this type of learning.

What I'd have done without Stack Overflow scares me to think about....

I should say that I do miss the thrill of buying a new big, thick programming book - it really was like Christmas for me when I got my hands on something that I knew was going to propel my education in an area where I was often itchy-keen to get going in or learn more about, and that feeling has never been replaced by the type of online-learning I do now, I find, but nowadays I tend to just need to 'get a job done', and for those tasks a good level of Google-fu will almost always get me to where I need to be.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[Clariman]

Thanks everyone. I think I probably will get rid of them. As a few of you have said, you can find out so much online these days. Copying some basic Javascript examples was my starter, followed by reading these books and online info. This was also supplemented by quite a lot of questions on this board on TMF and I thank you all for your answers there. I have recently gone back to university part time to study a humanities subject at post grad level and my home office is now over-flowing with books. As my other half says ... perhaps I ought to use the University library a bit more!

[madhatter]

I have recently gone back to university part time to study a humanities subject at post grad level...

Splutter!

[Clariman]

I have recently gone back to university part time to study a humanities subject at post grad level...

Splutter!

Go on then, I'll fall for it. Why the "Splutter!"?

[madhatter]

Go on then, I'll fall for it. Why the "Splutter!"?

Merely an involuntary reaction. On reflection, I’m sure there are plenty of humanities subjects at university level which are not a bit poncy.

[Garless]

Thanks everyone. I think I probably will get rid of them. As a few of you have said, you can find out so much online these days. Copying some basic Javascript examples was my starter, followed by reading these books and online info. This was also supplemented by quite a lot of questions on this board on TMF and I thank you all for your answers there. I have recently gone back to university part time to study a humanities subject at post grad level and my home office is now over-flowing with books. As my other half says ... perhaps I ought to use the University library a bit more!

I wrote a large JavaScript ephemeris program in the days before iPhone apps, when someone found a bug in later years I often had to go back to the books to remind me of syntax. Now my second free hosting service is closing down I have to decide if I want to just keep my local copy going. Could well dump the pages and books.

[sedices]

I don't think so but I guess if you're just after a reference for the future, you should just donate it to your local library so other people can access it as well and if you need a reference form there, you can still check out the book at the library. I learned how to code purely from apps and websites so I guess if you need any web design help, the information you need is just a click away.

[k333]

You could have a shot at selling them locally. Many areas have a local facebook page for this sort of thing for local collection, and I imagine they are quite heavy.

K