The shelf life of books

Part of the problem with graduating as a History/English double-major is that you've had years to get used to stuff in print staying passably fresh.  Like the sour cream in the 'fridge that should be primordial soup by now, but still passes the sniff test.  Written history and literature may be reinterpreted, and every great once in a while new extant material is discovered.  But the words really don't change.

Yet, although my college education has served me reasonably well in the past quarter-century, the above is one mental bad habit I haven't been able to ditch.  But this past week brought it home forcefully that I was, to a certain extent, spoiled for four years.

For reasons I can't now recall, the leftover (read: oddball) bookshelf that ended up in our bedroom was mostly stocked with programming-related books.  But then I needed to move them to paint the baseboard and walls, which forced me to take a hard look at a collection that would have been better triaged before the big move in 2011.

Some things are timeless--at least as timeless as they can be in I/T.  Give up my copies of Kernigan and Ritchie's C Primer or Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language?  Not on your tin-type.  Alas, the years have not been so kind to other tomes, covering (among other things):

• Visual Basic 6
• C# 2010
• Adobe Flex 4
• Java I/O (circa 2000)
• Java Servlets (circa J2EE 1.1?)
• Microsoft Visual InterDev 6
• T-SQL querying for SQL Server 2005
• Java2 Certification prep.
• ASP.NET MVC 2 
• Two Java books I remember buying when I started my I/T career (1999)

In fairness, Dennis still does enough work in classic ASP that my 2001-vintage reference is still relevant to his work.  But otherwise, owch.  What in the noodley name of The Flying Spaghetti Monster was I even thinking when I packed some of these?

Maybe, in a perfect world, Sally Annes would happily collect these books to send to programmers behind the Iron Curtain who were still working on Windows 95.  Scratch that--a perfect world would not include the Soviet Union.  Okay, maybe those programmers are really Portlandia hipsters coding IE5/Netscape apps. ironically.  Or something.

But the harsh reality is that these language versions will--unlike even bad fiction--return to vogue, except possibly for 2038 remediation work, and I'm not about to guard them for the next 20 years to save the world from Unixmageddon.  (Sorry, civilisation.)

Now I just have to bring myself to dispose of them responsibly.  Being the kind of bibliophile who's still outraged over the Library of Alexandria, I'm not sure I can consign them to the wood stove this winter.  (Besides, that VB6 book is like, five inches thick.)  Pity we're not into vermicomposting--we'd be set for bedding for quite some time.  Not to mention that we'd have the nerdiest worms in the province.