2025-09-28 Sun 18:54 Books, please make it stop

Since beginning of this year I kept reading book after book, with
small breaks for scientific papers and man pages.  And all of them are
super old as far as programming goes.  I finally managed to break the
infinite loop and stop reaching for more reading materials.

It all started with YT video "Have you ever used the 'column' command
in Linux?" in which Veronica reference book "The UNIX Programming
Environment" [1].  And then somehow it snowballed into:

1.	The UNIX Programming Environment
	by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike

2.	The Flat File Database Generator Ffg
	by Douglas E. Comer

3.	Thinking Forth
	by Leo Brodie

4.	The Elements of Programming Style
	by Brian W. Kernighan

5.	Prince
	by Niccolo Machiavelli

6.	How to build low-tech internet?
	by Kris De Decker

7.	Notes on programming in C
	by Rob Pike

8.	The Art of Unix Programming
	by Eric Steven Raymond

9.	Beej's Guide to Network Programming
	by Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall

10.	The Text Editor sam
	by Rob Pike

11.	A Generalized Text Editor
	by Christopher W. Fraser

This list includes books and papers that I read in print.  Man pages
and articles read along the way are already forgotten.  Most of those
are about UNIX, system level programming in C and text editors.  No
clue how "Prince" got there.

	> What are you reading?
	> 
	> Old letters.
	> 
	> Why do you keep reading them?
	> 
	> I don't know.  I'm trying to understand why we
	> keep making the same mistakes over and over.
	> 
	> - Cloud Atlas

I discovered that problems of the past are still here, and I have to
solve them for myself in my current project.  Fortunately old masters
left clues.  When searching for this secret knowledge online I found
mostly nothing, but starting from one book I kept getting another and
another recommendation from footnotes, mentions, people or projects
history.  Never before programming felt like actual computer science.

Anyway, most of the books I read are outdated to some degree, but I
can still have my favorites worth recommending:

1.	The Art of Unix Programming
	by Eric Steven Raymond

	Still relevant and introduction to history of Unix rly helps
	to understand why things are the way they are.  Many example
	are outdated but general lessons are teaching the Unix way.
	Essential when writing Unix software.

2.	Beej's Guide to Network Programming
	by Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall

	Latest revision is excellent and very up to date.  Man pages
	are enough for most things but with this book you can easily
	tell old interfaces from new interfaces apart.  Also many
	examples are just a copy paste solutions (after you add more
	error handling) for migration to IPv6 support.

3.	The Text Editor sam
	by Rob Pike

	This was the biggest discovery for me, but only because I'm
	working on text editor project myself ATM.  Rob Pike had to
	resolve similar problems and made similar decisions as me.
	But he did that in totally different environment and with
	different motivations.  A lot of good ideas in his paper.

4.	Wily
	http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~oz/wily/

	Not a book but similarly like Sam text editor this one was
	very interesting to me.  The whole website.

In this day and age, people are unbelievably lazy and unfocused.
Reading became a super power.

[1] https://youtu.be/uL7KvRskeog?t=276

EOF