this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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While I enjoyed having paper textbooks in school (until I got to college and they were $300+ each), when was the last time you seriously used a paper textbook to learn something new? In this day and age we have Google/Bing/Kagi and you’re going to search for the thing you need to know, pull up Wikipedia, read a few blog posts or the documentation from the project itself, and then apply what you learned.
We’re teaching children how better to survive in today’s world, not teaching them how to survive in our grandfathers world.
Now, my kid has read a few physical paperbacks for her high school English class, and reads plenty of physical books when she gets them from the library or buys them, but classwork is online, instruction is in person, and she seems to be doing just fine not carrying around 20lbs of paper every day. If anything I’d say her note taking has improved more than mine did when I assumed I could simply just open the book back up. This is the world we live in and she’s being taught how to survive in it.
I am actually reading a paper book right now to learn about configuring advanced features of ZFS. Hard to believe but it's much easier to understand than the fragments of information on Stack Exchange. The man pages are nice to reference but they don't really teach the concepts or give good examples. And Perplexity gave me bad information. Even for very technical things, which you might think would be the first to be displaced, there's still a place for paper books. Yeah I could figure it out eventually but reading this book has probably been faster, more thorough, and more approachable.