Vintage technology books
I own a ton of books. That is not a literal ton. It is an actual ton. Last count would be 26 boxes of 45 or more kilograms.
Nothing helps you to focus more on important stuff than the need to actually pack up your things. All your things. Into boxes, which then in turn are put into a bigger box, which is put onto a flimsy metal box and shipped across a number of oceans or into a long metal tube and hurled through the sky.
So I came across my nice shelf of computer books. All the classics. From Douglas Comer, “Internetworking with TCP/IP, Vol 1″ and W. Richard Stevens, “Advanced programming in the Unix Environment” up to “CCNP Advanced Cisco Router Configurations” and “Struts in Action” (Hello, Ted).
The dragon book. “The Art of Computer Programming” (all three volumes in a nice binder). The Abelson & Sussman. A book about RMON, SNMPv1 and SNMPv2 (I remember, they had to order it specifically and it cost a fortune back in the days). “OSPF - Anatomy of a routing protocol”. And and and.
The shelves look(ed, they are already cleaned out) impressive. But what to bring if you have a maximum weight allowance that needs to accommodate for non-essential things like bicycles, a bed, dinnerware and clothing?
For Java books, that is easy. Everything that references pre-Java 1.4, toss it into the bin. Apart from that, I developed an easy set of rules:
- Old, stable technology (e.g. K&R, Tcl): 15 years is no age for a C book. If it is older, toss it, unless it is a classic.
- Basic technology (e.g. TCP/IP, Routing protocols, Unix books): Older than 10 years: Toss. Make exceptions, err on the safe side.
- Specific technology (e.g. Apache Modules, Programming languages): Older than five years: Toss. Noone cares about Apache 1.3 modules any longer. Or perl 4.
- Theory books (Dragon Book, Knuth): Always bring. They probably never get outdated. The font gets smaller every year though; I am surprised how they do it.
So I ended up with a surprising large pile of books that I will toss out, some which I thought indispensable for a long time. Gee, I used the Comer to beat sense into a co-worker (that is not a figure of speech) in another life when he insisted on deliberately misconfiguring his SLIP (!) link. And now it is seventeen years old and off to college? Scary.
Amazing that some of my oldest and grimiest books survived that
selection easily. I did drop the Wirth (”Datenstrukturen in Modula-2″),
though I can not remember whether I dropped it by value or by reference.
BTW SLIP: There is “PPP Design and Debugging”, which I used to prove to a router vendor that his engineers are full of shit and they have a bug in their frigging PPP implementation with certain MTU sizes. A classic. The router vendor no longer exists and the engineer has probably retired years ago. Sweet, fond memories. Parting hurts.
Anyone wants to snatch up a few kilograms of technology books? 
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