Tech manuals are DOOMED!

I have loved reading for almost as long as I can remember but, with very few exceptions, I do not like reading tech books.  In general I find them to be rambling, poorly organized in relation to my learning process and quite frankly, boring.

With the wealth of information available on the Internet these days I am far more likely to reach for a my mouse and the nearest Web browser than my bookshelf.  Search engines offer a faster, more seamless means of finding the data I want, the Web itself contains pretty much anything I need to search for (unless it is proprietary or really obscure) and the information is typically available in bite-sized chunks - stackoverflow answers / blog posts / public API docs / ..

So why would I pick up such a book, even an electronic one?  Answer: I don't.

The few tech books that I do actually read do not follow the classic pattern of attempting to progressively introduce the reader to the subject matter over a series of long, dry chapters.

Instead they offer up a smorgasbord of insights into various aspects of the subject matter, in no particular order, allowing me to pick and choose my intellectual meals.

The books I choose invariably offer a deeper / broader level of insight than I can expect to find from the aforementioned online sources:  What are the aspects of the subject that I should be considering?  How should I approach key problems?  How are things conventionally done and why?

And in general I choose to read them away from the keyboard or at the very least away from my screen.  I read them like a book.  I read a few pages and absorb the knowledge they impart.  And later, when I am sat at my computer, that knowledge may have percolated through my consciousness and made the right connections to influence my work.

If I want information right now, I'll just Google it.

The tech books on my shelf quake in fear.  And well they should...

***
And it is done.  One week to the day since my revelation, I have cleared out my bookshelf.  Quite literally: 32 of 50 tech books gone to the used bookstore, a whole shelf cleared.  What remains are such repositories of wisdom as 'Effective Java 2nd Edition', 'Eloquent JavaScript' and '24 Deadly Sins of Software Security'.