> Wikipedia and the internet in general has done a great job of making shallow information readily available
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. The word 'encyclopaedia' literally means a volume of shallow, broad-base, all-round knowledge.
> But for the vast majority of topics, it hasn't come close to providing the kind of information available in books
I disagree strongly. Writing a book is an incredibly time-consuming and difficult endeavour, and not all people who have knowledge worth sharing have the skill or time to do it. By praising books as a supreme medium you put authors on an intellectual pedestal while suffering from (or being blessed with) their editorial choices and interests. Some great things have come from people scribbling on napkins, exchanging letters, or scribbling in journals. The Internet means these sorts of mediums can proliferate. If you want depth on the Internet, go to discussion forums, go to IRC, send e-mail, read mailing lists, watch talks, go directly to the personal blogs of experts, post comments, download electronic journals... these are the alternatives the Internet provides to going to a library. Don't wait for someone to patch Wikipedia.
In all honesty, there are only two valuable aspects I have ever found and love in a library: geographically local reference material, like newspaper archives etc, and a nice quiet place to study, away from distraction.
I mostly use those kinds of online sources, because I'm usually on the internet and rarely in libraries, just in terms of proportion of my time, and I rather strongly disagree that those sources are anywhere near as good as a library, at least for what I'm looking for. It's a huge breath of fresh air to find a good book on a subject, because it more often than not actually covers what's going on in a way that is far more opaque in dozens of StackExchange posts, blog posts, mailing list archives, etc. The rational exposition is just much better, if you can find a good book: explaining not only what's going on but also why and how, how it connects to other things, how it came about, where to look for more information, etc. It's really frustrating to work without access to a good research library for that reason, because you get only these much more scattered bits and pieces on many topics.
Two areas that I've come across semi-recently where this is particularly true: DSP and logic programming. There are some good books on those subjects, and they are very much better than trying to piece together Google results, especially trying to learn an area.
I guess a lot of it depends on how you learn best. I like to go deep, but it has to be on my terms. Sucking in books never gives me a sense of accomplishment unless I'm actively trying to 'rediscover' what is being taught for myself. I prefer to use reference material to open up lines of thought, then I go away and try to 'reinvent' it for myself, baby steps. I come back later to have the material nudge me in the right direction or get me over hurdles. Sometimes it's too hard and I'll drop material for something else, even if it's not as deep, or go without, rather than grind on, because I'd rather not know than 'know' and not truly understand.
Fully-formed 'rational exposition' of a new topic or area of study is just a terrifying thing for me because I'm worried I'll be swept up in all that exposition and not prod the holes in my understanding, perhaps not even see them. Later on I then feel I have to remember 'what the author taught me' rather than unravelling of the topic itself. Visiting a complete exposition later, after a bit of folly, I feel much more confident in both myself and the material. It's very inefficient in terms of time, but then I can spend a lifetime learning and still know next to nothing anyway.
While length doesn't necessarily = depth, there is likely a correlation. On average, a long book on a topic is going to be more in-depth (and more in breadth) than a discussion forum, IRC exchange, email, or even singular journal article. The Web is a great place to learn about a lot of things shallowly. To learn about a particular thing deeply (on most subjects, obviously electronics/software are an exception for obvious reasons of having more book-length content on the Web) a book or e-book still beats it.
Sure if you want to act as your own book editor and put together lots of little pieces of Web wisdom in disparate sources maybe you can get the same breadth/depth but that's not especially efficient.
And we haven't even begun to talk about the benefit of having a publisher/technical reviewer/editor vetting the contents of a book - acting as a gatekeeper...
Some of my current curiosities are served only by reading academic papers and contain algorithms that are only documented in patent filings. I see no books.
And another thing, even in computing some of the best printed literature can stink. No matter how many times I read TAOCP or how many lectures I go to I don't think I'm ever going to get an insight in to how Rudolf Bayer came up with red-black trees... an intuition I feel is much more useful to an inquisitive mind than learning the special cases and transformations, taught in CompSci and detailed on Wikipedia, or proving overall asymptotic complexity. TAOCP is a masterpiece but, as a reader, I will never feel the way Knuth feels writing it.
Knuth's TAOCP is an indepth encyclopedia on algorithms. It analyses algorithms that Knuth has learned from the field, but it's purpose was never to develop the "intuition" on development.
Algorithm Design by Jon Kleinberg is an expensive book, but this one teaches algorithm design methodologies. Instead of learning "Linked Lists" or various "Sorting" or "Seminumerical" Algorithms... Algorithm Design teaches approaches to algorithm design.
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Personally speaking, I have more hope in smaller books such as "Effective C++" or "Exceptional C++", which stands head-over-heals over the best "Web Advice" on C++. (IE: The C++ FAQ, which is very good at C++ Advice but doesn't stand up to books).
That said, major discussion of deep programming features and debates are now conducted online. Scott Meyers notes internet discussions on C++11 / C++14 as a major source of material on Effective Modern C++ (his new C++14 book).
Similarly, "Exceptional C++" is basically a collection of Herb Sutter's blog posts... updated based on the comments from the internet. Herb Sutter basically wrote "Exceptional C++", opened himself to internet criticism / discussion of his ideas... and then released the distilled work as a book. The book is a higher quality than his original blog of course (Guru of the Week).
Books will always be superior than the internet, by nature that I'm generally willing to pay authors $30+ to $100+ for their in-depth knowledge. (While the Internet is free). But the internet has forever changed how even bookwriting is conducted.
That said, the majority of books are crap. So its best to preview the author's writing style before buying. Blogs are actually one of the best ways to preview an author.
It depends strongly on the subject. For the majority of science and engineering subjects, books win hands down. Some recent examples:
1. Chemistry. Want to know the details of a common battery chemistry? The regular google results aren't helpful -- they're a combination of grade-school demos and premeds incorrectly explaining electrochem MCAT problems to each other. The google scholar results aren't helpful because the relevant literature is too old to be indexed, the trail of scientific discovery is too difficult to quickly and correctly follow, and/or it's in german (with shit OCR so google translate doesn't work).
Meanwhile typing "battery chemistry" into the library search system brings up several relevant tomes, the first one of which has exactly the discussion I'm looking for condensed into the space of several pages. A quick google search reveals that this page was never posted to the searchable internet.
2. Math (or Chemistry or Physics). Want to know the precise definition of a symbol you keep seeing? Too bad: google doesn't know how to search for formulas or symbols (btw, I'd love to be wrong here). Naturally, the journal article you're reading doesn't bother to define it, so you're SOL.
Unless you find a similar discussion in a book -- in that case, you just look in the front or the back and 80% of the time you'll find exactly the precise definition you need. The other 20% of the time you have to binary search backwards until you find the point in the book at which the symbol was defined. Easy enough.
3. Engineering. Want to find a cohesive discussion of X? If you go to google, you'll find 30 ppt presentations with piss-poor production value, big useless unexplained formulas with undefined terms and not enough discussion to fill in the blanks. In contrast, if you check out a book you can find a cohesive introduction via the index. If you're lucky, it even includes motivation: "we argue that X is a linear transform, we project it onto basis Y, blah bla blah" rather than a big nasty tensor equation. Maybe you read the first few paragraphs in the chapter if it's too hard and you need pointers to further supplementary info.
4. Computer Engineering. If nobody is willing to pay to make good digital documentation, sometimes engineers are still able to get funding for a book. I learned about Mach and mDNS this way -- the books were amazing compared to the digital docs and well worth 5x their price (by which I mean their printed price, not the $0 I paid to check them out).
5. Open Source. Books are a great open source business model because two magical things happen that wouldn't happen otherwise: 1. the author of the documentation gets paid, 2. the culture of bookwriting imposes minimum quality standards on their documentation. You get to learn the story. You feel like you're along for the ride, not someone who got dropped into a room full of people who already know what's going on and cantankerously respond to your questions with "google it" despite the fact that your post documented the search terms which failed to produce useful results.
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Books have a degree of cohesion and completeness that websites and journal articles lack. Since it sucks to follow printed citations, authors err on the side of including everything you need. The culture of bookwriting figured out long ago that you need to include the boring stuff too -- and that's a lesson the internet has yet to learn (if it ever will).
Also, the internet hasn't been around for long enough to capture every subject's burst of initial excitement + willingness to write about it. The list of things the blog-o-sphere doesn't know or care about (literally) fills libraries.
Science & Engineering bloggers willing to write highly informative articles are a scarce bunch. Historically, that communication happened in books, so that's where you often need to go to get what you want. The situation a lot better in computer engineering; y'all don't know how spoiled you are :P
I think the bigger gripe (and summary of your comment) is the following: books and the internet present information in a completely different way.
A book is by definition an end-to-end, self-contained experience. Even on highly-specific scientific topics, try to find one that doesn't bookend with context.
The internet has evolved into a place where it's normal to create an extremely specific piece of content without context. After all, that's what linking is for ("Or they could always go read Wikipedia!" Ha). Moreover, I would argue that the expert context that's necessary for ideal grokking in fact doesn't exist. On a information-wide scale, no one creates just context for other things: Khan Academy provides it by building end-to-end learning experiences, and blog posts create it in an extremely limited and piecemeal manner (we've all been fortunate to read one of those "Eureka!" expert blog summaries).
Indeed, it may not even be possible for such content to self-generate without external impetus. Where do shallow articles come from? Lay-persons (for lack of a better term) researching and writing for other lay-people (minimal time investment, maximum audience = $$). Where do hyper-specific articles come from? Trained-persons writing for other trained-people (maximum time investment, minimum audience = $grant$).
Does anyone have a motive for where and why "trained-persons writing for lay-people" (e.g. deGrasse Tyson or Sagan: maximum time investment, quasi-maximum audience) would be created? Aside from altruism and digitized introductory academia?
If you want to find a tragedy of the internet, it's the fact that it never evolved a systematic context-creation process. And so we don't have any. There may have been proposals in the original design of hyperlinking, and there were the 90s/00s "curated human indices of links". However, the "good enough" of modern search engines seems to have precluded the time investment necessary.
Let me refer you to part of my post you seem to have missed:
> The google scholar results aren't helpful because the relevant literature is too old to be indexed, the trail of scientific discovery is too difficult to quickly and correctly follow, and/or it's in german (with shit OCR so google translate doesn't work).
Also, irony:
> You feel like you're along for the ride, not someone who got dropped into a room full of people who already know what's going on and cantankerously respond to your questions with "google it" despite the fact that your post documented the search terms which failed to produce useful results.
60% of your complaints are about what Google does when given an extremely vague search term, from 1 of the 6 billion people on this planet who can interact with it.
Well duh. Google's general search is probably not going to be very helpful when you already know the specific information you're looking for. Use a specialty site - hell, use Google Scholar, which they built for exactly this type of problem.
Let me refer you to part of my post you seem to have missed:
> The google scholar results aren't helpful because the relevant literature is too old to be indexed, the trail of scientific discovery is too difficult to quickly and correctly follow, and/or it's in german (with shit OCR so google translate doesn't work).
> Use a specialty site
I happen to know the specialty sites that contain the information I'm after. You know what form it comes in? Scanned PDFs with poor OCR behind a paywall that I can get through by forking up $100 or by going to the library.
I have no way of proving to you that I'm a competent search-term picker, but do you really find it implausible that certain domains of human knowledge are poorly indexed and difficult to search using plain text?
I've found Shapecatcher (shapecatcher.com) useful here; you draw an arbitrary symbol (e.g. ∑), and it shows you the closest matches from a database of ca. 11000 Unicode glyphs, with each match's code point name (e.g. N-ary summation) and block name (e.g. "Mathematical Operators") -- and once you've found the name of the symbol, you can Google for its meaning.
Thanks, but finding unicode glyphs isn't my problem. I can do that easily enough with the OSX character palette or Julia (which automatically turns TeX escape sequences into unicode characters on the command line). My problem is finding the meaning of a symbol (or composition of symbols -- one above the other, in a subscript, underlined, in a left subscript, etc) in a specific context. Usually what happens when I put a unicode symbol + context into google (or google scholar) I get the worst of both worlds: false positives from the symbol mixed in with the hits I would have gotten with the context terms alone.
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. The word 'encyclopaedia' literally means a volume of shallow, broad-base, all-round knowledge.
> But for the vast majority of topics, it hasn't come close to providing the kind of information available in books
I disagree strongly. Writing a book is an incredibly time-consuming and difficult endeavour, and not all people who have knowledge worth sharing have the skill or time to do it. By praising books as a supreme medium you put authors on an intellectual pedestal while suffering from (or being blessed with) their editorial choices and interests. Some great things have come from people scribbling on napkins, exchanging letters, or scribbling in journals. The Internet means these sorts of mediums can proliferate. If you want depth on the Internet, go to discussion forums, go to IRC, send e-mail, read mailing lists, watch talks, go directly to the personal blogs of experts, post comments, download electronic journals... these are the alternatives the Internet provides to going to a library. Don't wait for someone to patch Wikipedia.
In all honesty, there are only two valuable aspects I have ever found and love in a library: geographically local reference material, like newspaper archives etc, and a nice quiet place to study, away from distraction.