It's been a hard habit for me to break, but when you know that you could do something and theoretically do it better, it can bias you against paying for something. None of that is meant to sound arrogant - every company could do a better job given more time and resources, just as I could. But my time isn't infinite and I've found that paying for solutions in my life is a good thing. Sure, I could run my own email, but I'll just pay for it. Sure, I could create an app that does exactly what I want, but this one is close enough and it's $10.

With knowledge, the problem can be worse. You can't even evaluate if it's any good until it's been given to you. At that point, you don't need to pay for it because you have it. The number of paid knowledge things that I see that don't really have good information and avoid all the real problems that they promised they were going to solve for you can be high.

I think sites can build trust with users, but it can mean creating a lot of free content in the hopes of converting some people to paid users. Of course, if that model is too successful, then there will be an army of people dumping free content hoping to do the same, but then your paid content is competing with the free content available from many trying to do the same business model. If Bob creates a business doing this, do Pam, Sam, Bill, James, and Jess try to do that a few months later which then means that the amount of free content is now 5x what it was and there's no need to pay for it because it'll be a freebie on one of those sites?

I train programmers, and strongly recommend they buy books or do other types of money/time investment to make themselves better (and more highly-paid programmers).

They won't do it.

I've had multiple programmers literally shocked and avoid my outstretched book. Once I got a question, said "I just read the answer to this in this book right here"... and the programmer refused to read the book to answer his question.

I don't get it.

This, coupled with companies lack of investment in their expensive engineers, is mystifying.

None of the above has anything to do with the FSF.

Maybe books are too low density. Like the “quantity of information” per amount of words is lower than a blog post for example.

I dunno, I’m not really a reading type but I do own programming-related books. It’s the only type of book I own. I learned a lot from books like The Clean Coder, The Pragmatic Programmer and some 90’s book about Design Patterns with c++ examples and I don’t even write c++

If anything, a good book (or video course) will be a high-density, concentrated pill of everything you need to know about the subject to know what everything is and how it interacts. By comparison, reading blog posts and random YouTube videos is more akin to "grazing" - sure you can learn, but not as fast and you'll be missing context until the lightbulb goes off.

Good programming books are some of the highest information density of any writing you can find. College professors tend to prefer the lower density versions which might be biasing people.

Is that true? Or even your actual experience?

The recommendations I got from lecturers at university were thick academic textbooks. The 'good programming books' popular on HN etc. - without taking anything away from them - tend to be more waffley blog-turned-book type things.

Aside from classics from the former category that are also popular in the latter. Sipser, the dragon book, Spivak, etc.

This comes to personal preferences, I generally prefer reference books vs educational books. Find a good fit between what you’re working on and what the book is trying to do and they can be extremely helpful

Best example that comes to mind is the first edition of SQl in a nutshell. It was thin reference that covered SQL and the major differences between different SQL databases that I picked up back in 2002 ish. Quite useful if your working with several at the same time, but not something to teach you SQL. I haven’t looked at a recent edition because I am not in that situation any more, but I presume it’s still useful for that purpose.

Granted most books are significantly more verbose, but the physical limitations of books can promote extremely precise writing with minimal extraneous information.

It's my experience that this is often the case. I don't like high-theory books, so that means that things like the dragon book aren't likely to be in my sample.

Some of the highest, but nothing like quantum mechanics, where my head explodes at page 2.

Do you have some book recommendations for web development?

The content I want already exists. It’s provided for no charge on stackoverflow, reddit, Wikipedia, cppreference, and a handful of other high quality sources. All of which do not charge users a fee, most of which obtain the content from users in the first place.

So as far as I see it, the problem is not that the content is uneconomical to produce. The problem is that searching doesn’t discover the content I want. It brings up geeksforgeeks or worse.

Precisely. For me, the value in paying for a course or a book is not that they produce this knowledge, but that they collate it, filter through subject matter experience they already have to remove misleading additions, and add in any missing parts that may take a long time to grasp without a "Eureka!"-inducing explanation.

The service worth paying for is turning the collection of facts into usable information.

Exactly. Filtering information from misinformation is also a good selling point.

I think a lot of it has to do with the sheer friction of paying. In a corporate context it's going to be a days long battle, at best to get a new piece of software approved- just from an expense pov- we aren't even talking the IT and infosec teams. If it's technical content on a website, sure maybe I can pay out of pocket, but it's actually a lot less friction to just move onto the next site than to open up my wallet, get charged and maybe get what I am looking for that justifies the price.

Most developers will rather spent 2 days to build something than pay $60 for something better.

They're not wrong. When I build something, it's mine and I control it. I get to learn about all sorts of interesting stuff, making me a better programmer in the process. If I publish it on GitHub, it becomes résumé material, helps other people and might even start a community if enough people start contributing. I get to contribute to the state of the art in free computing, advancing it not just for myself but also for everyone else.

If I pay for something else, I don't get source code, I get borderline malware that spies on me constantly, I'm subjected to idiotic non-negotiable terms and conditions and I'm at the mercy of some gigantic corporation that can kill the product at any time.

We don't pay for "something better" because it's not actually better at all. We're not laymen, we actually understand the fact it's a shitty deal. We're not some mindless consumer companies can just dump these products on. We have the power to create. The more we use this power, the better off we are.

I suspect the reason is the fact that not all developers live in the bay area, and $60 is a good money for them, and could worth more than 2 days.

Also if you code for fun anyways, you might as well build what you need, and get chance to use that shiny new technology while you do it. You save money, have fun, improve your resume, share projects with your friends and communities for kudos, all at the same time.

If I can do it in a way that's better suited to my use case, learn something from it and/or entertain myself, that may not be as bad a tradeoff as it may otherwise seem.

Reinventing wheels out of plain curiosity has exposed me to a variety of problems and their solutions, and I believe it exercises my general problem solving skills.

A big part of programming is learning. You need to learn. It's not only about learning a programming language. Programming language is just a tool. What you need to learn is:

1. How to use that tool effectively

2. How to build better products with it.

You are never done learning those. And the best way to learn is to (at least try) to build it yourself. Therefore I think it makes sense for programmers to try to build it.

Teenagers are likely to do just that. Their money is expensive, while their time is cheap. If they get to learn in the meantime, even better.

The Free Software Movement is for free as in free speech and not free as in free beer.

It's about freedom to access, modify and distribute the source code.

It's hard to convince anyone to pay for anything.