The nature of the technical book industry has changed a lot over the years. Humungous reference tomes, like Programming Perl and The C++ Programming Language, have become relics of a different age, with their reference material more conveniently looked up online nowadays.

Though ebook versions may still be viable, these old-fashioned mega tomes are too heavy to carry around, plus you would need (prohibitively expensive) hardback versions to comfortably read them in your study.

Slim, boutique books with small print runs, such as the excellent Modern Perl by chromatic, still appear to be economically viable. At least, I recently bought a physical copy of the 254-page A Tour of C++ (2022) and enjoy reading it in bed (reading physical books in bed is less likely to harm sleep patterns than reading on an electronic tablet) ... while I never open the mega tome The C++ Programming Language any more.

From my mandatory Perl Book Links reference, my favourite Perl book nowadays is Modern Perl by chromatic.

Update: might be interesting to compare the answers in this node to these two nodes from 2007:

• Is Programming Perl still relevant as a reference book? by vrk
• (Perl) Programming Books like the Camel Book by amarquis

I oddly enough remember vrk's node from way back when; my internet access was somewhat spotty in those days, and I was running freebsd on a toshiba libretto as my main machine, and honest to goodness reference books were incredibly useful. But it's been at least a decade since I've used any of those books for anything other than decorations.

But I take your point about the slim books with limited scope. I have purchased a number of those in recent years to learn a new language feature or something like that. But I also don't tend to hang on to those in the same way that I did the camel, the K&R, or Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment.

I also don't tend to hang on to those in the same way that I did the camel, the K&R, or Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment

Thanks for reminding me of the classic 1992 edition of Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, by the legendary W Richard Stevens (William Richard (Rich) Stevens, February 5, 1951-September 1, 1999).

I really enjoyed reading that superb book from cover to cover, scribbling notes on almost every page. As you might expect, I was deeply saddened to learn of the author's unexpected death in 1999, at the age of 48, especially given the cause of death has still not been disclosed (the second and third editions of Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment were published in 2005 and 2013 with a co-author, Stephen A. Rago).

See also References on running External Processes on Unix and Windows, which mentions the Windows equivalents of Stevens' classic Unix book. All three of these OS level tomes had hard covers IIRC.

I still use Programming Perl. I have had several editions and the 4th is on my main shelf. I still use it for looking things up. I have been getting better at searching through the manual pages, perlrun(1), perlfunc(1), and so on. However when I need / want to browse or have to study something, then that book comes off the shelf. It's just that it's a little heavy, which I guess is the cost of so much material being covered.

I've gotten so used to it that I forgot to mention it above, but I've cut thumb indexes into the 4th edition to mark a few of the sections, especially the functions and regular expression sections. That has helped very much dealing with the overall physical size.

The main printed book i still use on a semi-regular basis is my hardcover of Tannenbaums "Operating Systems, Design and Implementation, Third Edition". While i don't design operating systems, it's incredibly handy to look up stuff like the "Dining Philosophers Problem" and other stuff relating to interprocess communication.

PerlMonks XP is useless? Not anymore: XPD - Do more with your PerlMonks XP

I have the second edition of the Camel book on my shelf ("Covers Perl 5"), and I haven't used it for ... I don't even know for how long.

Of course, that's partly due to the nature of that book: These days I don't use books for reference documentation which is available online, and the Camel book is more or less a reference documentation. But if someone is new to Perl, I'd still recommend them to read the Preface and the first chapter of the Camel book, for which there's no equivalent in the man pages. I still love the style and humour of these chapters, which got me hooked up to Perl when I read them for the first time (in another century).

I still have that too, but it's autographed by Larry and Randal.

Naked blocks are fun! -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

I still use my two copies.

Half the year I live in Spain, the other half in the UK.

Does "using" include "it's below my 3D printed e-ink tablet stand on my soldering/electronics table so i can see the tablet behind my oscilloscope"?

This node sent me to my bookshelf to check...

Sure enough, Programming Perl (3rd edition) is there next to Programming The Perl DBI and Perl Best Practices. Next to those is Linux Secrets ©1996 which included Slackware v3.0!

They haven't been there for 5 years as that bookcase has been moved this year...but I cannot recall the last time I looked at them. I look up Perl command syntax online rather than in a book.

> Next to those is Linux Secrets ©1996 which included Slackware v3.0!

Bod, pleased to see you're a Linux guru with experience dating back to the 1990s! Well done for tricking me a few weeks ago, when I wrongly assumed you were a Linux novice. :)

pleased to see you're a Linux guru with experience dating back to the 1990s!

A book being present on my bookcase is vastly different to a book having been read...
...this book is definitely an example of "shelf development"!

I left my copy of the Camel book in the bookcase at my last job. It was my first book on Perl. Out of sentimentality (and gratitude), I just picked up an English version as EBook. There it is, the first title:

The Pursuit of Happiness

The only hardcopy book I still have is "Mastering Regular Expressions", by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl. It is absolutely the best book I have read on regular expressions because it has an introduction, an extended introduction, an overview of the features and flavors, the mechanics involved, practical techniques, and how to craft an efficient expression. The book also contains regular expression processing for Java and .NET. It is well organized and will guide you on your quest to use regular expressions to rescue you from seemingly impossible tasks.