I think part of it was that this was written in 2008 which is forever ago in internet time. I think book learning for programmers was maybe more prevalent back then. I know I was significantly more likely to read a programming book 8 years ago when the quality of information on the internet was much lower (2008 was the year Stack Overflow was founded!)
I was thinking that too. The younger developers I know haven't read most of those books because the information is easily accessible on the web.
When I started coding professionally you had to buy books because the information wasn't anywhere else, but today even for the more difficult subjects you can find papers and blog posts and wiki articles that cover what you want to know at different depths and from different angles.
Most of the information that makes some of those books worth reading is only easily accessible on the web in the sense that it's pretty easy to find ebooks of many of those books on the web.
Many people learn a lot of their development knowledge from the web (and I certainly do as well), but the majority of the web sources for material beyond basic language reference simply extract the easiest to digest parts of the major texts. This is why so much of what many people know about patterns, algorithms, data structures, and even OOP, TDD, Agile, Scrum, etc. is fragmented or even wrong.
oh, really?
> it's intended for the multitudes who are trying to appear smarter by pretending to have read them.
As opposed to trying to appear smarter by issuing decrees to the internet about what everyone who is "interested in programming" has read.