Well then, I must be in the utmost echelon of hacker demigods, as RescueTime tells me I spend the majority of my days reading programming stuff on the interwebs instead of working.<p>(In my defense, I do still manage to finish stuff on time...)
Even when I am actually doing work, I often spend at least half of my time reading and investigating existing code, not coding. Why? Because I want to:<p>1) Really understand what is going on in the existing code base<p>2) Make sure what I plan to do is in line with the philosophy of the current code<p>3) Make sure I'm not replicating something already implemented<p>4) Give my brain enough gestation time to allow lateral thinking to happen<p>In fact, often I'll spend some time reading, go off and practice juggling, then come back and whip off an initial prototype, then go and do something else distracting (read Hacker News) then revisit the problem again the next day. Most of the time, I'll figure out an even better way to do it.
" they are the kind of people who read things in order to better themselves as programmers. And that's already, you know, 5-10% of practising programmers"<p>I find this hard to believe. I have at least 20 friends who also program and they all read online and own programming books.<p>I'd like to know where Joel gets his statistics.
In one of my previous jobs we had this dude who had like 20+ books on his desk.<p>At best the guy was an average developer...<p>There is a difference between a read and a reference.
<i>The average software developer, for example, doesn't own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn't ever read one.</i><p>I used to own, and read, books about programming. Now my reference books at least are made obsolete by the web.
Meh. Whatever. If you learn online or learn by buying books or fall somewhere in the middle because you do both, you're still learning. Sometimes I just want something to read where I can read away from the damn computer under the sun. At the same time, there's a tonne of stuff online that will teach me the same thing. Who bloody cares where I learn it??? When I was earlier in my career, I spend a TONNE of money on books. Over the past few years, that's fallen to zero because there's a lot of information online. Recently, I started buying again just to change the pace. It really doesn't matter as long as the outcome is the same... which it is.
>And that's already, you know, 5-10% of practising programmers. It's not the vast masses of Java monkeys who were formerly VB monkeys who were formerly COBOL monkeys who are just doing, you know, large swathes of extremely boring stuff internally somewhere. <<p>I'm certainly not above the occassional look down my nose at Java, but how do you suppose someone would move to Java from VB without reading a few books or manuals?
Most of the CS students I know don't really do any coding or reading about CS outside of their classes.<p>But I agree, I think it is garbage, meant to make the reader feel good.
I don't know where his data are comming from, but in my experience, most programmers read... so this stat is definitely vastly different in different social circles...