Just for example Clean Code is a great book, but the presentation is so much better:

https://youtu.be/7EmboKQH8lM

When I see a 1000 page tome about every single feature of Photoshop, then nope. I'll google it thanks.

History is non-fiction, too. And I'd definitely rather read a book than some blog, because there will be a long thread of things that build up on each other, and I think books are just better suited for that.

So, things that require prolonged attention because of an overarching concept I'd rather read about in a book.

There was once a discussion about reading programming books and similar point was made about learning on the go. One HN'er pointed out that reading end to end helps to know what all exists. It resonated strongly with me and since then, when I start on a new topic - I make sure to read at least one book end to end.

But if it is your job to use photoshop on a daily basis it's worth going deep into that tome.

It made me chuckle. When I was a kid, I lived in a country aligned politically and culturally with the Soviet Union (it was a while ago). At school, we were taught the Russo-centric version of history. As the USSR collapsed, the country westernized, and we were taught the West-centric version of history. At least one of the two versions was undoubtedly full of fiction.

Recently more and more academics have started talking about bias in history, particularly cultural. Most cultures seem to exaggerate their history and gloss over some blunders to some extent.

Here's an interesting video example of cultural bias in history - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py1ZY0xGkNo. Here's an interesting book with a different take on cultural history - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Peoples-History-World-Stone-Millenn.... And, if I remember correctly, Great Courses Plus had a World history audiobook that specifically focused on the history of the rest of the world as opposed to the Western-centric variant.

Random tangent - over.

Another book on the same topic (https://www.packtpub.com/product/get-your-hands-dirty-on-cle...) has only 156 pages and is far more useful in practice - but you'll learn less about the authors adventures in history.

Not saying this is the case here, as the other looks decent and has a history of writing content.

At some point I wonder if these organizations realize that if they continue to dishonor unsubscribe attempts that they simply get marked at spam. In the context of gmail I always thought too many organizations that get marked as spam just hurts them beyond the user they did not honor. Does anyone know if this is so?

The last non-fiction books on the other hand were huge disappointments. Even Daniel Kahneman, to my surprise: Noise had a good idea and was well written, but could easily have been 1/4 of its size or less. I don't have either the time or patience to go through 75% fluff. It feels more and more like books are written for the less intelligent audience, with the abundance of examples and repetitions.

As for the blogs I read: AstralCodexTen, Zvi, MarginalRevolution, Noahpinion etc. They're obviously not everybody's cup of tea since it's about my tastes and preferences, but I dare anybody to say even above-average non-fiction books are better than that.

I remember reading most of the book and skipping a couple of chapters. While the results and ideas are great, I feel most of the chapter is the historical background, Ie “Tversky and I were doing this in the 60s …” It could be heavily reduced and still get the point across.

Do you have any advice on how to retain blog posts better? Re-read them everyday for a few days?

I can't imagine limiting myself to a single type of textual presentation.

The Emperor of All Maladies, The Gene, Our Mathematical Universe are some that are better because of their book format. I'd put Hackers in that category too (along with pretty much all the books by Steven levy).

The phoenix project is a lot more entertaining as a novel too thought that kind of blurs the lines towards fiction.

The Splendid & the Vile was the most enjoyable book of his imo.

This applies to many non-fiction best-sellers in the self-help and pop science categories, but is very unfair as a generalization about non-fiction. (and bloat is not restricted to non-fiction, either - do we really need 10,000 pages of Wheel of Time or Stormlight Archive?).

I'm looking at my bookshelves now and see great books like Ryan's "A Bridge Too Far," Peltzold's "Code", Hodges' "The Enigma," Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers," Churchill's "Marlborough." None of these feel "bloated" or "padded" (okay maybe "Marlborough" is a little bloated). None of them were written to convey a handful of ideas to make you look smart at a cocktail party. Surely the information in these books could be condensed, but that condensed form wouldn't produce the same experience.

I'm a recent fan and discovered I enjoy the worlds. I find them engrossing. imo Sanderson could cut down 10-20% (Rhythm of War in particular suffered from length). But, I did appreciate his own defense of length in the genre.

https://www.tor.com/2014/03/04/words-of-radiance-and-the-art...

His insight seems to boil down to

1. Treat it as multiple books if you prefer. 2. "I get the chance to write what I enjoy. I understand it's not for everyone. That doesn't bother me."

That said, I'm a huge Sanderson fan so as far as I'm concerned the more Sanderson the better! :)

Is this really that rampant or different from SEO? Padding a book out with fluff has a cost. What's the cost to pad out an article with keywords or lengthen for SEO?

Second, most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they’re not from today."

Thank you for reminding me of this excellent essay.

https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/

I’ve started to put more of an emphasis on “active” reading (for lack of a better word) in which I take what I’m reading and think it through for myself, rather than just passively accepting it.

It is certainly slower than passively reading, but the result is that I actually understand the subject much better.

You could read a dictionary definition of the word courage and vaguely understand it. You could read a full page with examples and understand it better. But when you read Socrates’ dialogue Laches on the meaning of courage, your understanding will be far deeper. Even if you don’t agree with the arguments made, the act of thinking through all of the arguments helps you understand what your own views really are.

Obviously most books aren’t written as Socratic dialogues, but if you take the arguments and stories that are presented throughout the book and actively think on each one, your understanding and retention will really improve.

And this is not to say there aren’t bad books and that many aren’t bloated. But providing you with the opportunity to think on a topic from many different angles through the use of different examples can be invaluable.

First, there's entertaining/pop non-fiction, like, say, Malcom Gladwell's stuff, which has a lot of fluff but at least you enjoy the reading.

There are history books and memoirs that are just interesting - for example I've recently went through the entire series of Churchill's WWII memoirs, they're mostly awesome, though I did skip a couple of less interesting chapters. For these I prefer audiobooks while driving, which make it easier for me to focus.

Then there are CS books where you can pick and choose chapters and don't have to read the entire thing; they just go way deeper than blog posts, so if you want to REALLY know a subject, you better buy a book or two. I don't mean books like Clean Code or The Pragmatic Programmer, etc which I almost never read in their entirety and can be summarized in 10% of their length, but more deep guides to things like Information Retrieval, NLP, Database Internals, etc.

This has soured me on the genre of pop-nonfiction in general, because my trust is absolutely zero at this point (it's not like Gladwell is the only confabulist there) - and if I have to cross-reference every single fact, I might as well just skip to the bibliography section. If there is one.

That has, in fact, become my criterion for most non-fiction I buy directly (without reference/recommendation) - does it have a bibliography section. I recommend it, because at the very least it gives you a great shopping list for round two on the subject :)

This culture is hugely detrimental. You simply cannot in-depth absorb knowledge about anything in minutes. This isn't how the brain works. Churning through dozens of articles and spending small amounts of time with each one will leave you with no recollection of any of it in a year. It's not a serious way to learn.

Unless we're talking about promotional campaign books or something of similarly low quality, non-fiction books elaborate on things at length for a reason. Details, motivations and nuances matter. And you don't get that out of as sparknotes summary. You will not really get what an author wants to say without spending time with it. It takes people years to truly grok and write down what they want to teach, you're not going to learn it in an hour.

One thing I like about following good blogs is seeing ideas from authors develop week to week. I think this encourages a deeper understanding of the topic and makes some books seem immediately outdated in comparison.

I'm reading more fiction books now. I want to detach the idea of "learning" from my reading habit and read just for the pleasure of it.

There's still something about good prose that connects with you unlike anything else.

For example, The Secret Life of Trees or pretty much anything by Bill Bryson or Antony Beevor. The goal is not to pick up a new skill, but to enjoy a few hours with someone who knows a lot of trivia.

You can usually tell in the first few pages if it's written in that cookie cutter "must make it to 350 pages so I'll stuff it with 200 pages of fluff" style. It is really annoying though. I love books but this drives me crazy

However, blog posts often has more up to date information and they are, by necessity, more direct. They are good when you are closer to a master in the subject, I feel like. They are akin to research papers, but for engineers.

However, some books end up with much longer notes than the books themselves. One of my favorites was actually Aristotle's Poetics. A lot of the classic non-fiction are like that; the article versions are longer.

But what I've learned is avoid most practical books; things that tell you what to do. I think the problem is that the advice is generally weak, and the extra "fluff" is just finding support for this weak advice. An exception is the Pomodoro Technique which works perfectly fine when you don't read the book.

Instead go for the books that study the phenomenon, like The Power of Habit instead of Atomic Habits. Something like 33 Strategies of War is written as a historic book. The summaries tend to be much weaker than the book. Those are the kinds of books you should be reading.

Poetics was actually recommended by a lot of screenwriters, who basically called the rulebook. So you can also go from articles to books when the same books are emerging in multiple sources.

like what? any example?