> Are people scared of books these days?

Given the amount of video tutorials on YouTube, I would say yes.

Some books are complicated to trace and buy. And computer books have a short-life so in the last years are mostly vanished from local libraries. I had tried to buy lisp books before in dead tree format, online and local, without much success.

> Are people scared of books these days?

No, but books are more difficult to access than online tutorials and more expensive.

If I suddenly decide I want to learn Common Lisp one night, I'm going to Google "learn common lisp" and read/watch tutorials before I buy/borrow a book. That's not to say I won't move to a book eventually, but tutorials are infinitely easier to access.

Besides the fact that one of the most popular modern books teaching Common Lisp is available as an online website for free (Practical Common Lisp), introductions to popular programming languages – including a few other books on Lisp – can generally be readily found on pirate ebook communities. There are some domains where you are forced to "buy" or "borrow" books to learn, but coding is definitely not one of them.

I think most people learned programming by doing stuff, not by reading books. Basic, Bash, Perl, PHP, Javascript all agree with me...

You can't learn programming without doing stuff, but to understand what you're doing, you need to learn some facts - and books have one of the best, if not the best, ratios of learning to time spent.

(In fact I'd be worried to work with programmers who didn't back their experience in their primary language(s) with at least one solid book.)

Programmers who manage to learn a language primarily by using it usually do so because of one of two reasons:

1 - the language was simple enough that there really wasn't that much to learn

2 - that programming language was similar enough to the languages they already knew that there really wasn't all that much to learn

When you're trying to learn something that's radically different from what you already know, and relatively complex, then it's a lot harder to just pick it up by playing with it and using it. That's when you usually need a good book, teacher, and/or course.

I've heard so many programmers brag about how they can learn any language in a weekend, or about how "all languages are the same". Usually they know only one language paradigm: Algol-like imperative languages, and sometimes don't even realize that there are other paradigms out there that are mindbendingly different, and which might actually be challenging to learn if all they've done their life is programmed in languages like C or Java.

> I think most people learned programming by doing stuff, not by reading books. Basic, Bash, Perl, PHP, Javascript all agree with me...

Most people I know who learned programming (including with the languages you list) did so by reading books (or the digital analog) and doing things, and the former was essential to the latter. So, no, I don't think those things are examples which your support your “by doing things, not by reading books” position at all.

Are most Perl programmers ignorant of the camel book? For the others I might agree. For myself, I learned a little bit of HTML "on the fly" (and had the help of a short web series to teach me a few tags, this was before w3schools, or at least before I knew about it) but a friend who was letting me host and FTP onto a subdomain of his shared server noticed I could trivially get rid of a ton of repetition by using PHP just to include a header, write the unique content, and then a footer. He wrote an example for me to apply and recommended a PHP book and that's how I learned programming. If you're a beginner, a beginner focused book makes a world of difference.

I think the main trouble is that it's hard to know what the good books are for your particular needs, and most people aren't going to want to try exploring some alternatives to find a good one, or maybe haven't been given a good recommendation yet, so they don't bother reading books at all unless really curious or forced to... When you're just messing around or just need to edit relatively simple business logic in whatever language without making a bunch of new stuff, you can get away without understanding most things in enough detail that a book would cover.

Lots of books exist for different needs (references, subject-focused, beginner focused, general tour of the language...), so again it's hard to pick out in advance the one you need right now. Some of the more generic language level ones targeted at professionals still manage to leave out crucial sections like "How do professionals actually develop in this thing, and what alternatives are there? What's the simplest way? How are things deployed to production?"

For Common Lisp in particular the problem is two-fold. People get recommended SICP all the time, which is a good book, but they read as far into it as they can and then assume they know Lisp and wonder what the big deal is when compared to modern dynamic languages that let them loop without recursion or use infix math. But if they then go on to try and learn about Common Lisp, so many references (including Practical Common Lisp) don't show the good stuff for way too long, if ever, but begin by saying it's basically a waste of time without emacs. Now the reader has to learn emacs and like it. It's not a waste, yet books don't always address that. On the other hand if you're tool-agnostic like some Lisp books you might give a similar impression of SICP and leave out some of the cool bits because they can be hard to convey in text. The Debugging Lisp series at http://malisper.me/debugging-lisp-part-1-recompilation/ is my favorite at the moment to show people what makes Lisp different. It's emacs focused but it shows you why you might want to use emacs, or some other editor that can hook into the same underlying commands like 'COMPILE that aren't emacs-specific. The REPL is like a constantly present gdb (and all that implies like the possibility of better viewers than the text terminal, such as emacs) but way better.

> I think the main trouble is that it's hard to know what the good books are for your particular needs, and most people aren't going to want to try exploring some alternatives to find a good one, or maybe haven't been given a good recommendation yet, so they don't bother reading books at all unless really curious or forced to...

This is a solved problem, too, but not many people seem to understand the solution until told explicitly. I know it took me a while to figure it out, but here it is:

With the Internet (and little English proficiency), you have the access to the very best material human race created on any given subject. In programming, the best books for topic X can be easily identified by searching for "best books on topic X" and browsing the resulting Reddit and Quora threads. It's literally that simple - if you see some books popping up constantly in such topics with high recommendations, it's a safe bet to go and read them.

RE Common Lisp, I don't think it's that bad, as long as people get directed to PCL instead of SICP. I always recommend SICP as a book for blowing your brains out, and learning 80% of concepts used in programming in general - not as a book for learning Lisp, because it's not about that.

The Debugging Lisp series is awesome, thanks for linking that!

> With the Internet (and little English proficiency), you have the access to the very best material human race created on any given subject.

This is a common belief I hear from people, but it is deeply, deeply flawed.

The Internet mainly has access to the very best promoted material that the human race has created on any given subject.

> and little English proficiency

Of course, it can't be best if it's not in English.

> The Internet mainly has access to the very best promoted material that the human race has created on any given subject.

I disagree, insofar we're not talking about some obscure lone genius work which for some weird reason isn't known to anyone else. I mentioned Reddit and Quora for a reason - communities around specific topics can recommend best sources pretty well, and evaluate them by quality.

> Of course, it can't be best if it's not in English.

Well, for better or worse, English is the dominant language of science and technology today, so it's expected that best resources will be created in, or translated to, this language.

> recommend best sources pretty well

The face value interpretation of your original statement is that not does the Internet accurately recommend the best sources, but it also hosts them too.

"access to the best material" is more than merely "access to reliable recommenders of the best material", right?

Within technical fields it hosts that material, too. Once you know the name of a book it's usually easy to track down a PDF somewhere :).

That might be, but it might not be in the future and meanwhile I'd be weary of drive-by downloads and virus infected warez.

Anyways, you are missing the point, that teaching involves conversation and that can't be easily gotten from a book. Sure, a book is a good supplement, some are called companion, even, and with programming the need for good documentation is called out often enough, but still.

> That might be, but it might not be in the future and meanwhile I'd be weary of drive-by downloads and virus infected warez.

Honestly, I'd call it learning experience on using the Internet ;).

> teaching involves conversation and that can't be easily gotten from a book. Sure, a book is a good supplement, some are called companion, even, and with programming the need for good documentation is called out often enough, but still.

Teaching involving conversation with a good tutor can indeed be even more efficient than books. But that's a pretty rare situation (average university classes don't count - too much people, not enough time, too crappy tutors). Books are a good substitute - in fact good books for a given subject exist exactly so that you can learn something without having a specialist explain it to you face to face.

Companion books is something I'd generally avoid, since they exist to support a class, not to give you information.

Nevermind university, a publicly visible lisp community just doesn't exist, with all due respect, to motivate it's use, books or not. That sounds dismissuve, but Programming should be a social effort in the large.

I guess the point I was trying to make is that patronage at the right time might have a lot more potential to generate motivation, insights, etc. Professors in huge classes are too distant for that, agreed, but one benefit of university is the social experience. Outside of university, stumbling on the right path without guidance would be extremely lucky, while finding a good book on the internet depends on asking the right questions and one single book certainly isn't enough. And most people need guidance on how to work through books, to begin with. Sure, with regards to information technology, the internet hosts the largest community there is to learn from, but arguably it is, again, almost too big for a novice (and might have a lot of negative side effects).