Programmers Don't Read Books -- But You Should
When I started programming and doing sys-admin professionally, I used books a lot. I remember a rainbow of OReilly books on my shelf; classics like the camel book, Java in a Nutshell, mSQL/MySQL, DNS/Bind, and the ridiculously large Sendmail tome. Over time though, the quality of the books definitely went downhill, and I found that most of the info I really wanted could be found for free online.
Nowadays, I still pickup programming books every now and then if I want to learn something completely new — I’ll read the first 5 or 6 chapters to get familiar with the concepts I might not otherwise be exposed to, then come back to the later parts if I want to look something up and didn’t find it online.
That said, two recent Oreilly books that I think are excellent, don’t suffer from bloat, and which are good cover-to-cover reading are:
- High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
- Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, scaling, and optimizing the next generation of web applications
Also, as an aside, the first book I ever bought on Amazon (November 3rd, 1997) was a programming book for a long dead technology:
- High Performance ISAPI/NSAPI Web Programming: Your Complete Guide to Creating Fast, Powerful Web Server Programs
Currently I have 12 books on my desk, 3 of which are open and I have used in the past week to find information that I was unable to find on the web.
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jhalickman reblogged this from daryn and added:
had forgotten to mention this...my original post, but I have been using O’Reilly Safari...
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daryn reblogged this from jhalickman and added:
started programming and doing sys-admin professionally,...used books a lot. I remember a...
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jhalickman posted this
