Ask HN: Best programming books in the last couple of years?

It's very helpful for understanding the software many of us use on a daily basis though, which is extremely important. That sort of knowledge helps you evaluate when different solutions are appropriate, what their shortcomings and strengths are, and to understand why those shortcomings and strengths are there in the first place.

A lot of it is things that could be explained individually, but there's really something to be said for holistic views on a topic.

I’m not sure how the book helps even if you do need distributed databases and message queues.

You will understand why you use Kalfka

"Nobody ever taught me about a B tree. I had heard of it. When I went to write my own B tree, on the bookshelf behind me, I’ve got Don Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming, so I just pulled that down, I flipped to the chapter on searching and looked up B trees and he described the algorithm. That’s what I did.

"Funny thing, Don gives us details on the algorithm for searching a B tree and for inserting into a B tree. He does not provide an algorithm for deleting from the B tree. That’s an exercise at the end of the chapter, so before I wrote my own B tree I had to solve the exercise at the end. Thanks, Don. I really appreciate it.

"Adam: That’s awesome. Did you pull anything else from that book?

"Richard: Well, it’s an amazing volume. I can’t give you a specific example, but from my era, everybody has to have read or at least skimmed through, at least browsed through The Art of Computer Programming, and know that algorithms that are there, maybe not Don’s exact implementation. I mean, I never took the time to learn MIX, which is his assembly language, but it’s useful to flip through and look at all the algorithms he talks about. I think that just a year or two ago I needed a pseudorandom number generator, and I was, “Let’s see what Don recommends.” You pull it off. You see what he does."

https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

useless everywhere basically. No sane person would sit down and read TAOCP.

I was just looking at the preview. I would have liked to have seen more in the preface than just a quote and short paragraph.