Ide or code editor confusion

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Friday, August 5, 2016 at 6:36:45 AM UTC+12, Michael Torrie wrote:
> On 08/04/2016 01:23 AM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
>> That’s why I’ve come to the conclusion it’s a waste of time buying books
>> on computing topics. They start to reek of decay while they’re still on
>> the shelf.
> 
> Except for old Unix books!

I don’t think this one <https://www.amazon.com/Software-Tools-Brian-W-Kernighan/dp/020103669X> has aged well.

> I've got an old book on sed and awk that will likely be in date for years
> to come!

I may have used sed, but I could never see the point in awk--everything it could do, I could do just as concisely in Perl, and more.

> There's also an old book on vi, another on regular expression.

Does your book on regular expressions mention character classes, for example <http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/grep.1.html>?

> So some things are invaluable references.

I would say that applies to more fundamental principles and theory, rather than the detailed functions of particular pieces of software.

> Moving targets like Python, that's another story of course!

When even bash comes out with new versions with major new features, you realize that everything is a moving target...