Older editions of which books were better than the new ones? (2010)

mathoverflow.net

41 points by susam a month ago


tmoertel - a month ago

In one way, many newer editions of textbooks are worse than older ones: the printing. That's courtesy of modern print-on-demand systems, where instead of sharp offset printing you get glorified inkjet output that's noticably blurry. And instead of a bulletproof Smyth-sewn binding, your "hardcover" book gets you a short-lived perfect-bound paperback glued into a hard cover.

When it comes to buying textbooks, unless a newer printing has corrections that I care about, I'll purchance an earlier printing to get the better book.

lurk2 - a month ago

I find the vast majority of textbooks I have ever used tend to be overly verbose and graphically confused, with lots of inserts that distract from the reading process without adding any relevant information. If you read a textbook from fifty years ago, it notably reads like a book, with a coherent narrative structure. Contemporary textbooks read more like magazines; eliminating text boxes, colors, and columns would make them far easier to read.

There’s also a tendency in contemporary textbooks to try to relate topics to concrete things in the real world. This is a key thing to do when you’re teaching to show students both how they can do something and why they would want to do it, but someone who is reading the book has already been convinced of the subject’s importance - they just need to be told what they need to know about it. This also leads to the book becoming dated faster because the examples draw on trends that go out of fashion, even though the principles of the field likely haven’t substantially changed since the 1960s.

linguae - a month ago

1. I’ve read that the first edition of Philip Wadler’s and Richard Bird’s Introduction to Functional Programming is better than the second edition, but having read neither, I can’t give an opinion one way or the other.

2. I have deep respect for older editions of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, particularly those from the 1980s and 1990s. Part of it is my bias toward the classic Mac UI (though I love early Mac OS X through Snow Leopard), but another part is due to how well written these older guides are. The older Apple Human Interface Guidelines contain a lot of useful information that all developers should read; much of the advice given is timeless even after 30-40+ years.

https://github.com/gingerbeardman/apple-human-interface-guid...

johnklos - a month ago

Computer books change over time, for obvious reasons. The O'Reilly animal books are always good, but they've removed some useful information in later editions.

For instance, the [sendmail bat book](https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/sendmail-4th-edition/97...) originally talked about all sorts of ways to deal with resource limits, particularly memory, because this was often an issue with servers in the early '90s. Later, memory became cheap and huge, so discussions about this were removed from later editions.

Even when memory ceased being a limitation, though, learning about how to monitor and what to do about heavy resource usage remained important, so the removal was an overall loss. I wish that O'Reilly would make available for free the things they removed from later editions.

I wish I'd've had the money and space to buy the original editions of many of the animal books. I figured they'd live at the bookstore until I did, but then bad things happened, and now bookstores are rare. Perhaps one day I'll find some.

PeterStuer - a month ago

Somewhere in the 80's most basic science textbooks went from clear and concise to overly verbose and ladled to the hilt with colors and distracting "illustration" clutter making most later editions not just worse, but even an assault on learning and understanding.

lukev - a month ago

Data and Reality, by William Kent. A timeless classic on the computational representation of, well, anything and everything.

The third and currently only published edition, published posthumously, insists on adding a bunch of mid-2000s era design conceits based on OO paradigms. An absolute travesty.

ww520 - a month ago

I found out the older edition of the Dragon book was way better than newer editions, which have many sections chopped off.

lsy - a month ago

For CS-related books, I think the original 1979 Hopcroft and Ullman is better than its successor editions.

pengaru - a month ago

IME with technical computer software books, the good ones worth reading and dedicating bookshelf space to anyways: The first editions tend to describe a simpler form of the subject, and contain the most distilled and succinct description covering the minimum required salient points for publication.

I'm pretty sure it's without exception. I have no multi-edition technical books that shrink in size in subsequent editions. So I end up with collections of editions for books of this type I really value, preferring to reach for the earliest editions first, and only after I can't find what I'm looking for, do I proceed to the subsequent editions.

Old programming/operating system design books are such a pleasure to read. Simpler times make for simpler, easier to understand documentation. It sucks to come at a foreign, complex, mature system in reverse chronology.

stevetron - a month ago

I have a copy of the CRC Standard Mathematical Tables, 27th Edition, CRC Press which I purchased as a suppliment to the text in a university calculus class I was taking. I should have picked a different year, they had both newer and older, but this one had a discounted price and was shrink-wrapped. It was also missing pages 153 - 184, which I soon discovered when I tried to look up something in the book that was listed in the table of contents, but was among the missing pages.

maciejw - a month ago

Lonely Planet. In 2013 we've done a Morocco backpacking trip with just a Lonely Planet guide - no phones, no Internet access, no pre-booked accomodation or transport. The guide contained maps, hostel suggestions, POI, transport options and a lot more. This year we brought the newest LP release to Thailand, and it was mostly useless - no transport or accommodation info, bad maps, generic POI descriptions. We are not buying another LP guide.

vmilner - a month ago

Richard Dawkins claims later editions of Darwin’s Origin of Species got worse because of trying to appease critics.

andai - a month ago

An older edition of Think Java has an example that still amuses me greatly to this day. Appendix B.3, Page 222 (240 in pdf):

https://www.greenteapress.com/thinkapjava/thinkapjava.pdf

_xerces_ - a month ago

In the realm of fiction, they released edited versions of Roald Dahl books that were more politically correct and designed to be less frightening to the fragile children of today.

rahimnathwani - a month ago

Straight and Crooked Thinking. New editions aren't by the original author.

https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=336

jhanschoo - a month ago

Pat Billingsley's Probability and Measure 3e. was reissued in an Anniversary Edition, which is just the same content but with several typographical errors.

dr_kiszonka - a month ago

Calculus Made Easy is a "thoroughly bad and vicious book."

(I especially recommend the epilogue.)

amboo7 - a month ago

Essentials of Programming Languages 1st ed. is special

pinewurst - a month ago

K&R

aaron695 - a month ago

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heavymetalpoizn - a month ago

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