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.