I’m a bit of a pack rat… I have a hard time getting rid of anything I think I might possibly need in the future, and that’s especially true of computer books and magazines. Once upon a time, there was no internet… a sad fact that makes me feel older than my parents who can remember a time without TV. There was no Googling MSDN, no easy access to message boards, no coding sample web sites. Back then all you had was paper and ink, and you learned what you needed to learn by going to the bookstore and picking up the latest programming book on that subject. And we liked it!

A programmer’s bookshelf was more than a reference library though; it was your peer resume. Other programmers would look through your bookshelf the same way that animals size each other up in the wild. When you started a new job, your bookshelf contents were like the cologne and nice clothes you put on for a first date. It was a huge part of the first impression you made and helped define what you knew. Did anyone care if you’d really read those books? Of course not! Just seeing Design Patterns, Introduction to Algorithms and The C++ Programming Language was enough to grant you elite status your first day on the job (at least to those who mattered).

At my desk right now, I have approximately thirty books on the shelf. I’ve read them all from cover to cover, some of them several times. However, I haven’t read any of them in the past five years. At times, I’ll crack one open for a quick reference to something I can’t find quickly online, but seriously, they’re relics. I know that I should just do the smart thing and admit to them that the internet has caused their jobs to become redundant. I should tell them that the bookshelf is being downsized, and that they’re jobs have been outsourced to the web servers at Google. I just can’t bring myself to do that, though.

Every one of them has, in some strange way, come to mean more to me than just the information they contain. I can look at the cover of almost any book on my shelf and remember the reason I bought it, the project I was working on when I read it, and the difficult problems that it helped me work my way thorough. Many of the books have pictures of the authors on the cover, personifying them. All of the books make me reminisce to the period of time when they were read, the same way that so many songs from my first year of college do. I feel like I could take my programming books out for a beer and have a blast catching up on old times.

My programming bookshelf isn’t about learning anymore, and it’s certainly not about impressing anyone. I may at some point retire them, but not anytime soon. They sit on my shelf like old friends who I want to share my new programming experience with. They helped me out through tough times and I still want them to be there for all of my latest projects. I think my COM ATL books are grudgingly impressed with all the new-fangled .Net stuff, though I don’t think they trust it. My sockets books like to shake their walkers at web services. And of course, my first HTML book doesn’t think this fancy web 2.0 nonsense looks anywhere near as good as the first Geocities home page it helped me make.