No, books about web development are not useless...

Yesterday on LinkedIn I came across a post from an apprentice developer asking for book recommendations for learning web development.

And among the few replies, one of them struck me because I've often seen it come up:

"Web development can't be learned from books, everything moves too fast and books are already outdated before they're even released."

But guess what: that's false!

Sure, some web technologies do evolve very quickly, JavaScript comes to mind in particular with its yearly updates, as well as all the tools and frameworks surrounding it that change very rapidly.

I do think that people who invested in books to learn AngularJS (1.0) are now mostly using them as furniture props, but that's far from being the case for all web technologies.

The TCP/IP protocol, on which a good part of the internet is based, was invented in 1975, and the HTTP 1.1 protocol, the cornerstone of the web still today, was born in 1999.

The last major version of Nginx came out in 2004 and Apache in 2012.

PHP 7 was released in 2015 while PHP 8 has just come out (late 2020, with minor releases in between), and MySQL 5 dates back to 2005.

Version 5 of HTML dates back to 2014, and the first recommendations for version 3 of CSS emerged in 2012; both of these languages are still the supported standard in modern browsers.

Some of these technologies (aside from their minor updates) are more than 10, 15, and even over 45 years old! And you're going to tell me these are technologies not worth learning through books because they move too fast?

Personally, I learned to build my first websites with this book by Mathieu Nebra released in 2013, and I'm sure most of the lessons in it would still hold up today!

It would be like refusing to learn how chess pieces move from a book from the 70s just because high-level strategies have changed thanks to advances in computing: it doesn't make sense.

If books make it easier for you to learn the incredible world of the web, don't let anyone give you a hard time about it, and feel free to drop the link to this article as a response—it's on the house.