On Friday, August 5, 2016 at 6:36:45 AM UTC+12, Michael Torrie wrote: > On 08/04/2016 01:23 AM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote: >> That’s why I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a waste of time buying books >> on computing topics. They start to reek of decay while they’re still on >> the shelf. > > Except for old Unix books!
I don’t think this one <https://www.amazon.com/Software-Tools-Brian-W-Kernighan/dp/020103669X> has aged well. > I've got an old book on sed and awk that will likely be in date for years > to come! I may have used sed, but I could never see the point in awk--everything it could do, I could do just as concisely in Perl, and more. > There's also an old book on vi, another on regular expression. Does your book on regular expressions mention character classes, for example <http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/grep.1.html>? > So some things are invaluable references. I would say that applies to more fundamental principles and theory, rather than the detailed functions of particular pieces of software. > Moving targets like Python, that's another story of course! When even bash comes out with new versions with major new features, you realize that everything is a moving target... -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
