[iyulaev]

Good observation but I disagree, to some extent. Technical books that teach low-level knowledge and technologies will always become obsolete quickly. But books that enable the reader to understand deep concepts rather than shallow technologies have a much longer half-life. This is similar to the complaint that engineering school is always "behind the technology curve" which is nonsense. You don't go to school to learn technology, instead, you learn the basis underlying it. This latter knowledge changes much more slowly. A good technical book should aim to teach the same.

[chx]

Indeed. When do you think SQL and Relational Theory will be outdated? And, do you think you can learn that from a wiki or a blog?

[VLM]

Even deeper, something like regular expressions, how do they work?

Or shallower (sort of?) you can't sell a cookbook of "whats the regular expression in perl to match the first word of a sentance" because we have google for that, but you can sell a style guide type book like "Modern Perl" where you probably could google everything in that book, but it would take 1000 different searches and not have a common voice.

[epsylon]

Relevant abstruse goose comic. http://abstrusegoose.com/531