How long do you keep your programming books?

Question

I have all these programming titles on my shelf and I'm running out of shelf space. How do you decide when to get rid of a book -- and when you do, what do you do with it?

Answer 1

Keep the books of CS fundamentals or software design for as long as you live.

Get rid of programming books focused on specific technology that has become or is becoming obsolete. I, for example, threw away my VB 6.0 books years back.

Basics: forever. Specifics: when needed. The same suggestion may apply to principles or ideas inside your mind.

Answer 2

Programming books are evergreen.I will have it for ever.When i get free time i brush up with some of the concepts in the book to make me more better.

Answer 3

Take the less used ones off the shelf and store them in a safe place, they are great to look back on. Alternatively if you have an office job you can pile them on your desk like a madman and people will think you're a brainer =)

Although I never sell my CS books.

Answer 4

Buy a new bookshelf. There is no way to have too many (good) books - programming or not!

Answer 5

I'm really short on shelf space, so:

Reference books that are outdated or unused for a year or so go. I also ditch the CS fundamentals books I cannot remember having read ;)

I generally find the "have I read this book" question to be useful. If I can't remember I usually discard it, paper recycling for all of it!

Answer 6

I don't buy bad books IMO. Lots of O'Reilly, Wiley. No product specific stuff. Still, getting rid of books is hard.

I honestly try to answer, "Am I ever really going to learn that technology? Really?"

Then I donate the books to my local library.

Answer 7

Step one:

double intrinsicValue = book.GetValueToMe();
double usedBookMarketValue = book.GetValueInUsedBookMarket();
if(usedBookMarketValue > intrinsicValue) {
    book.PostForSale(new[] {"Amazon", "eBay"});
}

Step two: ???

Step three: profit

This works for me every time I have sold an old CS book.

Answer 8

The freebies from the publishers are always the first to go.

When I buy a book, I usually mentally classify it as "I am going to keep this forever", "I am going to keep it until it is superseded or no longer useful", or "I am just checking this out, and if I don't like it I will ditch it right away". Ditching bad books quickly definitely helps.

The toughest decisions are the books that were useful but have become obsolete. When I was younger I got rid of these, but there were a few such decisions I came to regret. (If anybody has an IBM 360 Principles of Operation or an IBM Pascal/VS manual, I am in the market.) If a book is obsolescent but is really well written or describes a really good design, I will keep it indefinitely. For example, I will never throw out my 1st edition PostScript red book, because it was a very nice description of a very clean design, and 2nd and 3rd edition PostScript are (in my opinion) terribly bloated. I will also keep my 1st edition LaTeX Companion even though it is obsolete, because I know where to find everything in it.

Textbooks are a prime candidate for getting rid of---if you decided you needed it after all, there is always a market in used textbooks.

As to where, there are organizations that donate books to poor third-world universities. I usually try to send books there, since computer books are big and they don't sell well at the local library.

I hate getting rid of books.

Answer 9

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/208293/when-to-throw-out-old-programming-books

Answer 10

I use E-ink book reader.

So there are only two items on my shelf: moleskin journal and this reader.

Answer 11

Tomes of the dead tree? Does anyone still use them? I have shelves full of books that I just can't bring myself to part with even though some would be useful to others, some are just not worth owning and some, well... have pure historic value.

I was going to come up with a witty remark about buying more bookshelves, but I know it's not what I would do.

I have (almost) since stopped buying books. The Interdoodle is a good resource, and often it's easier to click a link in my bookmark bar (I keep the C++ and ruby-doc references there) than it is to turn around, reach over, find the book, grab it, open it to the index, etc.

Non-computer subjects are a different matter. It's much easier to brush up on 'mathematics of one ton burrito meals' (I know, I Googled it) from a good text book than it is to find a decent online reference!!!

Answer 12

Chuck them all and use e-books instead.

Answer 13

First i will find the pdf format of the old books and I keep that soft copies of books in hard disk .Then I give the books to some friends if they are interested to read.I keep only few books(new books) in shelf.

In ebook we can search the particular content easily.So ebook is better.