It's the time of year when folks pause and reflect, thinking about the year gone by and the year to come. I've been thinking a lot about books and the Bookshelf. It's no secret that book sales are down across the board, and we're feeling the pain. So I've been wondering: do we still need books?
I am certain we do.
When you read a technical book, you gain something that you can't get from search results and LLMs; a book changes how you think about your work. Not by giving you a single solution, but by reshaping the mental models you bring to problems in the first place. That’s where insight, intuition, and inspiration actually come from—not from isolated answers, but from spending time in the author's world, absorbing their understanding.
Insight comes from seeing new patterns, new ways that things can interact. A book has the space to go beyond "how to do x" and explain why things are the way they are. A book can be nuanced, exploring trade-offs, failed approaches, and constraints; the parts that usually get edited out of a quick video or blog post. When you read, slowly and deliberately, you start to see how ideas connect and how decisions interact. Insight isn’t about accumulating facts; it’s about seeing relationships. Books get inside your head and make that happen.
Intuition develops when you couple experiences and feedback. Spending hours with a coherent, well-argued text lets patterns sink in. Over time, you start to recognize familiar shapes in new problems. You get a feel for when something is too damn complex (which is most of the time nowadays). That kind of judgment can’t be downloaded. It emerges gradually, through repeated exposure to good examples and sound discussions of what is good and bad.
Inspiration happens when an author helps you see what is possible; how to turn your ideas into something real. Good technical books aren’t just about tools or techniques—they’re about creating new, exciting, things. They make you look at things differently, and open up fresh possibilities.
In a world full of instant answers, technical books still matter because they don’t just tell you what to do. They help you become the kind of developer who knows why.
Wrap your head around a book this New Year's. And, to make it easy, there's a coupon for 40% off everything below. But hurry: it's only good for a week.
