At the risk of playing up to my own golden age bias there is a worrying trend in modern developers to be a card-carrying member of a particular world view based one a "One True Authority" to provide a simple and easy answer to all their problems.
It is not difficult spot the members of the currently popular sects. Every conversation about a development or design issue is a lesson in scripture from the holy text and no actual detailed thought has to be given to the problem as the good book gives us an easy take away answer. Among the obvious are the uptight Fowlerites clutching their holy domain models, the process obsessed Agileans and their inquisition offshoots, Church of the Latter day Requirement Gatherers and the GOFian and Patternism branches with their platonic one-size fits all models undistorted by the cave wall of reality.
I am not saying that the many books written in these areas have no useful lessons to give us, rather my point is that there is a trend towards the single world "Argument From Authority" bias among a lot of developers I interact with whose views are dominated by these types of computer writings. Argument from authority is a variation of the induction round-tripping problem that leads to "The Authority" being accepted as a source of ex-cathedra knowledge. Once this is your starting point, then all such pronouncements must be followed in some semi-automaton manner and are the base from which all your opinions flow without critical evaluation. Now, I think if you talked to the guys who actually wrote the books many would be the first to assert this not how they intended them to be interpreted. However, like all reasonable ideas that are not empirically grounded (and some that are) they are rapidly dogmatized by the faithful.
It is as if the actual business of writing programs that are elegant, efficient, performant and based on empirically demonstrable algorithms and data structures is no longer of importance in the higher level world of the true-believers.
The interesting commonality of these types of books and their die-hard followers is that they are only passingly interested in the nuts and bolts of running programs, but rather focus on the process surrounding programming, metrics of the project or vague over-arching non-falsifiable approaches that purport to smooth away the ugly realities of real-world issues. At the danger of over-generalising, in my experience, many programs that are generated from these divine principles in practice end up bloated, over-complex, poorly designed in respect of their runtime behaviour and survive mostly by the dint of throwing memory and hardware at them. Such ideology cannot make make your programs better if you neglect the runtime algorithmic and data structure fundamentals of lower level programming approaches, no matter how much your belief re-assures you these are mere details, or how close you stick to the divine path.
A respite from this modern zealotry can paradoxically be found in earlier readings that revolve around the specific programming literature characterised in works like Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language, Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls or Knuth's epic The Art of Computer Programming. Many of these types of books and papers tended to address specific techniques that can be empirically derived and tested and provide a useful growing toolkit that you can dip in and out of.
Observationally, (and I am generalising again) many developers who are rooted in this sort of background tend to be more open to taking bits and pieces of approaches and techniques as appropriate to solve problems and do not demand that anyone diverging from this view should suffer the fate of all heretics, and, to quote the Life of Brian, "Even... and I want to make this absolutely clear... even if they do say, "Jehovah. "
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