> I can't really see there's much demand for Java 1.3, or Dreamweaver 4.

Designate one bookshelf as your "memory shelf". Keep the books on the languages you learned the most from or that remind you of your best (or most horrible) projects, and place them on that shelf.

Display it prominently, and it will be become a conversation starter for every nerd that comes to your home. "OMG, I haven't thought about Dreamweaver in years!". You can then share war stories.

It will only get more fun as the years pass.

That's the best use I can imagine. I love it.

Whenever I visit peoples homes, I look at their bookshelves. I pick one book that may indicate something in common, and I make a comment or ask a question. It rarely fails to start a great conversation. And when you're fixing their computer and waiting half an hour for a malware scan to finish, and the customer insists on sitting there watching, such conversations are life savers. Plus, you learn a ton.

Books are so heavy. If you move often, they can be a real burden, especially if they are no longer used.

If you keep them as a conversation starter, try this alternative method.

https://youtu.be/UqLTU9uFlPA?list=PLsgvviE9c9fBEPvopDnHcYhyN...

.

This is amazing, jokes so timeless they could have been written yesterday.

Or maybe just posters?

Right next to your copy of HoTMetaL Pro.

I like this idea, but if I did this I would have to have the conversation outside of my flat.

That's a really nice idea. I wish I had kept more of my books now.

Most old books are effectively disposable decor - the industry prints them by the millions and many have a limited life akin to the Dreamweaver how-to's. The "last a lifetime" highly sought-after books are truly the exception here.

For archival purposes you can go see if it's in the Library of Congress or scanned into Internet Archive, and if not, that's a project you can opt to take on(but it's pretty high effort). Quickly checking for resale value as other comments suggest is also not hard, just expect that most of your stash will go straight to the bin, and getting more out of it means making it your job.

About 30-some years ago, I bought a book entitled "The Unix Programming Environment". I was just going to college, and the machines were all unix-based. I figured it was worth some of my student grant to figure out how to use them..

A few months ago, I picked up my significantly dog-eared copy of TUPE and leafed through it to a section I'd remembered being about 'hoc', the higher-order calculator language they derive from first principles. I'm currently writing a 6502 compiler and I was implementing the assembler stage. I wanted my assembler to have macros and be able to calculate expressions etc., because I'm planning on having an asm [...] block in the high-level code. Being able to call the macro "_xfer32 r1,r2" is a lot more appealing than a long series of lda/sta...

So I sat and read about hoc, and worked my way through it, eventually coming up with something I could put into my code and call for any expression calculation. The compiler is a full-blown AST-based model but assemblers are much simpler beasts, and accepting of more limitations. Hoc (or rather an adaption of it) was an ideal basis for what I wanted.

Some old books have timeless wisdom within.

What are some examples of comp Sci/programming "last a lifetime" books? I am just a little confused about this statement.

Oldcomputerbooks.com focuses on computer material from the 1940s through about 1975. Some years back they bought my volumes of Knuth's TAOCP and one book by Edsger Dijkstra, _The Discipline of Programming_, but not anything more recent.

These may not "last a lifetime" in some sense. But early computing books, especially by well-known authors, may come close.

IMO, the following would be in that category:

Algorithms, unix networking, assembly books, the art of computer programming, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, anything by Benjamin Pierce, good compiler books, discrete mathematics, the art of electronics, Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Spivak's Calculus, ...

Theory of Computation

From the hip: Knuth, Brooks, Gray, Sussman. General theory type stuff rather than specific technologies. Stuff on how to think about problems rather than specific solutions.

I have a more recent one from 1990. "Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages" by Bertrand Meyer. It is math heavy.

Just throw them in the trash. There is no way to recycle them, and nobody needs them. Do not waste your own and other people’s time by trying to “find them a home”.

> There is no way to recycle them

In NYC, we can put out paperback books with our paper/cardboard recycling.

It's stuff like this that makes me wish I had more artsy friends that can use "lost art". I'd honestly pay for someone to take them and make something out of them

Use it to raise your monitor to the right height

I got one of those VESA mounts so the Perl, and Java books have been replaced by technology.

I agree, this is what I do too.

Stuff that is specific to old versions of applications is probably best used for kindling or to show off how awesome your 50 cal is. Stuff that is more theory based will be appreciated by somebody.

My father had shelves of computer science books from the 50s and 60s - the first half of the books would always be dedicated to how to decipher a particular professor’s writing and flow charting style, and then it would get into the actual computer science. Nobody writes books like that anymore. He also had a complete set of IBM System/360 manuals at one point. Then he threw everything away and it just killed me. He had boxes of both used and unused IBM punch cards that suffered the same fate. I would have hsuled it all off just for nostalgia value if I had known.

The binding of books makes them hard to recycle and usually they just get trashed.

Don’t waste charity shop time, if you have technical books that are of no historical interest and are long irrelevant with expired technologies, just trash them, they served their purpose.

Ask yourself if there is a practical chance that a particular book would be able to get into the hands of someone who would actually value the information inside. If not, garbage.

Most of them are pretty thick so they can be used to line the walls of bunkers for extra bullet proofing.

Or book shelves along the wall as additional insulation, it must go someway to increasing the U value.

Honestly, I am super into old computers and have bought antiquated manuals. There are a ton of people into it. Depending upon what you have, I’d actually take them off your hands… like the Java book. I don’t care about Dreamweaver, but someone would. Post them on eBay. If the buyer pays shipping, anything is better than nothing right?

Look up and use the Media Mail rates. They’re subsidized to help move books and media around.

The charity shop really won't want them if they have no resale use/value.

I'd be astonished if those books cannot be usefully recycled alongside (say) cardboard.

But you might first ask your local museum or university computing dept if they'd like some for historical record!

In his "diaries of a bookseller" series, Shaun Blythell, owner of a 2nd hand bookshop in Scotland, often describes taking crates of unwanted books to a recycling facility.

Java books are still useful if they were considered good while current. Many good programming books remain useful even as the language evolves and the syntax diverges. Dreamweaver 4 can be useful to someone to understand the concepts of design. Browsers will still mostly happily render old code. I'd give them to a library if they are willing to accept them or list them on a site like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace for your locale.

C, C++, Linux, Unix, and Cisco books are eternal. They may not teach you secure ways of doing things, but they are eternal. NetWare may be obsolete. ;)

If there’s a retrocomputing museum in your area, chances are they’d accept your books as a donation.

Pay someone $10 to make twenty origami Blade Runner unicorns out of the book pages and sell them as artsy cyberpunk tributes for $5 on Etsy. Keep in mind the cost and logistics, so it would probably be best if some kids in your neighborhood worked for pocket money...

Yeah, I know it's already out there but yours are sustainable cyber art, aren't they?

download a digital copy from the web. throw out the paper.

I did a clean out a couple of years back of cassettes, books, CDs, and vinyl LPs and replaced them with digital copies. I also threw out the IKEA Billy bookcase they had been stored in.

I kind of love this idea. How do you do this, especially if you're throwing originals away, in a frustratingly and methodically legal way?

There are many legal archival websites out there.

The way I see it, is that I am merely transferring the informational data that I already own from one medium to another. I am not 'pirating' anything that I didn't already own before.

Those books that I couldn't replace, I kept. A lot of cassettes, vinyl LPs and CDs I made copies of myself from my own media. That took an investment of my time in order to save my space. ('Audacity' and an analog-digital converter from Amazon. Audacity also helped clean up some of the worst scratches on the LPs.)

Once I had copied off my LPs and cassettes, I could also dispose of the cassette-player and turntable.

I haven't completed my task yet. I still have some snippets of video on various VHS video-cassettes that have to be converted to digital if I can get my VHS videoplayer to work again.

I am still in the throes of converting decades-old photos that had been locked away in boxes to PNGs that display as a slide-show screen saver on the computers' screen.

I went through this years ago and have some regrets. I don’t regret getting rid of all physical items, but some. Here’s why:

1. Album art and lyrics… gone. Would have loved to share these with my son

2. Digital books can’t be skimmed. I have a physical copy of Turbo Pascal above a toilet and love to skim it while doing the business.

3. Photos. We have tens of thousands of digital photos. The gems get lost in this mess even if you star/favorite them.

If you have a few shoeboxes of physical photos, don’t get rid of them; cull them. Remove the ones that are scenery and landscape. Keep the faces and people photos. Write metadata on the back (who, where). Frame a few, keep the rest in shoeboxes to look at every 5 years.

Album Art is still around. I keep that separately from the audio. I use it also as a record of the order of tracks on an LP.

2. Digital books can’t be skimmed.

Very true. That's probably what I miss most too.

But I see that as an offset. Many books I've had that just sat there year after year on the shelf, getting yellower and dustier by the day.

Did I mention that I'm an 'information hoarder'? I still have files on my archive disk from 40 years ago.

I did this with my CDs and books while making room for a nursery. But I regret getting rid of the hard-cover SICP. I have a PDF, but would like the book again and it no longer exists in hard cover.

I used to sell old IT books on Amazon or Ebay. Thankfully most were more timeless than "Foo 1.2.3 in 21 days". Once I even acquired and sold a one-foot-cube-sized MSDN box for about a thousand dollars. Both of us made a lot of money.

At some point Ebay deleted my account and I recreated it later but lost my history. Amazon now requires invasive identity verification I refuse and won't let me sell anymore, despite having over a decade doing it in good standing. It is possible it was related to me briefly selling an ebook, which doing permanently took away some of my privileges. Dunno for sure, the site is obtuse and has more archaic layers than the Windows control panel. Easy to get into a link loop and never find out why it doesn't work.

TL;DR—These big companies just DGAF. I now throw old IT books in the trash/recycle-bin when I move. Currently have some about CMS that would be useful to someone.

> I can't really see there's much demand for Java 1.3, or Dreamweaver 4

You'd be surprised. Go to "sell back your books" and install the app, scan in the bar code or QR, and find out. They might offer you a small amount of money.

They also take some non-technical books, btw. They send you a prepaid shipping label, too.

The Peach Press Dreamweaver 4 book is listed on Sell your books at £0.46. I’m surprised it’s worth that much, the postage and packing would be far more.

At around 2lbs (according to Amazon), it might be worth roughly that much as relatively clean recyclable wastepaper.

(Not that that's the likely reason; it's probably just an out-of-date/low-volume price point.)

On the one I cited, you supply the box and pack it. They pay the postage.

That’s a good tip.

I was pleasantly surprised to see “Wicked cool shell scripts” worth 4x “High Performance habits” at 48 cents

Hollow them out and hide stuff inside. The old hardcover Java books work particularly well.

Those pale blue hardcover Unix books are quite excellent, made for this job. Best would be to hide possibly embarrassing, smaller, books in there. Crap du jour "in a nutshell", that sort of stuff. On the outside, you are a gray beard, reading Stevenson and knowing the ins and outs of Unix Networking, TCP/IP, and System Calls, but on the inside, the secret of your actual software career "in a nutshell" is laid bare in secret compartments.

I throw them out all the time. I constantly buy new books and throw it older ones. If I donate them to libraries or goodwill I’m selfishly burdening them with useless books do I just throw them out myself.

Burn them for heat.

See if it's been archived digitally or not. I'm sure there is someone here who at least knows someone who is interested in preserving old documentation.

I used to donate them to my local library because I thought they would know best what is worth to keep and what to throw away.

Did your library know you were donating them or did you just leave them by the door? The polite and ethical thing would be to call and ask if they accept such donations first. If they don't you're saddling them with the cost of disposal instead of paying it yourself.

I gave them to the staff. They seem happy with the donation and even asked if I wanted to receipt to use for taxes purposes, which I declined.

If you’re looking for wacky ideas, here are some:

- get some resin and make micarta with them, then sell the micarta or use it in some creative projects

- use them for all your future gift wrapping, especially when giving to fellow nerds

- wallpaper a closet or two

- make a collage on plywood and hang it up as art

- make origami paper cranes

Have fun!

Love how often Dreamweaver gets mentioned. Must have shaped many people's connection to software development. I've only used it a couple of times but I assume it's the HTML output that people are critical of :)

I've donated all of my old books to local library. I've also donated some of my old high school books to school. Those are editions published by school, and I had them in mint condition.

I had dozens of obsolete books (think "Introduction to PHP 4").

- Libraries didn't want them

- Collectors didn't want them

- Charities didn't want them

Ended chucking them in the bin.

If you are in Canada I might buy a few :D

I put mine in a near by Little Free Library and in a few days they'd all been claimed.

give them to homeless shelters, or any charity, maybe someone will get interested and you'll change a life, even if the book is outdated

the main reason I'm where I am today is the 2 programming books I got as a birthday gift at 10 yo

I use them as furniture. Or as to elevate my computer laptop.

Jason Scott from archive.org may be interested in such things.

kindling

Fire starter.

post a pic or title list!

Donate to the libraries.

I tried this and the library was not interested (as in, refused to take a look at the books cover).

I went to a different one when one refused. Libraries hold book sales from time to time. Find one that does book sales. They would appreciate the donation.

trash