Okay; it needs to be asked. Do we really need a history of programming languages/the internet/computers as the first chapter of almost every stinking technology book ever published?
I’m sorry, I came to read about servlets — do we have to talk about arpanet, cgi, etc, for 10-20 pages, again?
</rant>
Well, maybe in some cases the answer is “yes, maybe, just in case the reader skipped this material in all the other books he or she has ever read about computers“. And maybe some of that is valuable, but… sheesh. I’m pretty sure I’d have about a thousand fewer pages, altogether, on my shelves if this repeated history was excised from my programming/computing books.
Let’s just publish a short book called The History of Computers, Programming Languages, and the Internet, and at the beginning of all our other books we can just refer to it and say, If you are unfamiliar with the history of computing, you should have read this first.
Kind of like putting #include <history> at the beginning of every technical book… If only it were that simple.
