Issue #567  (Tech Books, Frameworks, Git/CLI, JSON/DB)05/30/24

Lately I've been thinking that we may currently be in the dying days of the tech book. For a long time now, it's been fairly difficult for tech writers to make a decent living off authoring tech or programming books. We all know it's fairly easy to just 'google it' when you want to learn something. But tech books were still popular because it was nice to be able to read a professionally edited tutorial on a difficult topic.

Now, however, it's not just search engines that are competing with authors, but AI-based tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and similar. These tools have been trained on sources that we've relied on for years. So why bother purchasing a book when the information is at your finger tips and you don't even have to worry about SEO spam anymore?

Are tech and programming books in their dying days?

Of course, tools like ChatGPT are far from perfect. I've received answers from ChatGPT that I know are wrong. It seems like that's going to continue to happen at least to some extent. But it also seems that more and more tech professionals are relying on AI tools to do research for them that they would previously get from a search engine, an online reference, or a book. And since the book is the only one we used to pay for, it's easy for the book to become the one that stops being used.

I've authored or co-authored multiple books over the past 12 years and the revenue from those was fairly minimal even when books were selling well. So I can imagine how tough it must be now to try to make decent side money from a book.

If you happen to still be interested in buying tech books, I maintain a couple of reading lists (all affiliate links):

• This newsletter's reading list for books on programming (mainly front-end development)
• A reading list for my Tech Productivity newsletter with various books on productivity and related topics

We'll have to see how things play out, but it certainly feels like the days of being able to bring in some extra money from authoring tech books is soon going to be a thing of the past for many of us.

Now on to this week's tools!
 

Web Frameworks

Melt UI — An open-source Svelte library of unstyled components for building high-quality, accessible design systems and web apps.

FastBootstrap — A beautiful and free Bootstrap theme with fully responsive, expertly crafted components, built with Atlassian Design.

Supercharge Your Finances — Sequence connects all your bank accounts, credit cards, savings, and investments on an intuitive money map. Create automations with smart rules and IF statements, and execute your strategy directly from the platform to manage your finances.    SPONSORED 

SaaS-Boilerplate — A boilerplate and starter project for building projects with Next.js with App Router support, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, Jest, ESLint, Prettier, Husky, and more.

Extension — A plug-and-play, zero-config, cross-browser extension development tool for building browser extensions with built-in support for TypeScript, WebAssembly, React, and modern JavaScript.

Slash Admin — A fast, modern React admin dashboard template based on React 18, Vite, Ant Design, and TypeScript.

Enterprise SaaS Starter Kit — An open-source Next.js SaaS boilerplate for enterprise SaaS app development, with support for Tailwind, Postgres, Prisma, Stripe, Playwright, and more.

React Native TypeScript Boilerplate — An all-in-one boilerplate for building projects in React Native with Typescript, with built-in theming support, React Navigation, light/dark modes, native splash screen integration, and more.

Next SaaS Stripe Starter — An open-source SaaS starter for building projects with Next.js 14, Prisma, Neon, Auth.js v5, Resend, React Email, shadcn/ui, Stripe, and Server Actions.

Qwik UI — Two sets of copy-paste components, one headless, one styled, both accessible, easy-to-use, and customize.

Git, GitHub, and CLI Tools

manai — An AI powered interactive command line completion for Zsh, with a hotkey to trigger and ask anything about your work-in-progress command line.

StarSearch — GitHub Copilot for your Git history, to get information on contributor history, key contributors, finding experts for a project, etc.

Elvish — A powerful scripting language and a versatile interactive shell that runs on Linux, macOS, BSDs, and Windows.

GraphQL with React: The Complete Developers Guide — A 13-hour video course to learn and master GraphQL by building real web apps with React and Node. A good resource for those familiar with React.   SPONSORED 

GitShare — A service to share private GitHub repositories with a colleague, a recruiter, a fan, a student, etc., with just one click.

GitMe — An online tool to help you create an eye-catching GitHub summary card that you can add to your GitHub README or download as an image.

Freeze — A Go-based CLI tool to generate images of code and terminal output, with support for PNG, SVG, and WebP.

floro — A distributed version control system for creating and managing interoperable static assets and i18n strings, with a native cross-platform app, CLI, and browser extension. Free for public repos and up to 6 members.

pet — A simple, Go-based, command-line snippet manager, to make it easier to recall snippets from your shell history or ones you rarely use.

McFly — A Rust-based tool that replaces your default CTRL-R shell history search with an intelligent search engine that takes into account your working directory and the context of recently executed commands.

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JSON Tools, Databases, etc.

PostgreSQL Index Advisor — A PostgreSQL extension for recommending indexes to improve query performance, with support for generic parameters, materialized views, and more.

JSONGenerator — A text-based, language-independent tool to generate precise JSON data structures for mock data. Input the two dozen or more functions on the left side to generate the copy/paste data on the right.

GraphQL with React: The Complete Developers Guide — A 13-hour video course to learn and master GraphQL by building real web apps with React and Node. A good resource for those familiar with React.   SPONSORED 
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JSON Fixer — A simple online tool to fix JSON data that contains one or more syntax errors or other formatting problems.

Radish — A super-fast drop-in replacement for the in-memory key-value store Redis, built with Go.

SQLite Schema Diagram Generator — A SQLite schema diagram generator built with Makefile, to help get a quick overview of your database schema without installing a large complex tool.

DBeaver — A free cross-platform database tool for developers, database administrators, analysts, etc., with support for all popular SQL databases.

SQL Template Tag — ES2015 tagged template string for preparing SQL statements, with support for `pg`, `mysql`, and `sqlite`.

PGlite — A WASM build of Postgres from ElectricSQL that lets you build reactive, real-time, local-first apps directly on Postgres.

gql.tada — A GraphQL document authoring library, inferring the result and variables types of GraphQL queries and fragments in the TypeScript type system.

Commercial Apps & Classifieds