Books Actually Do Contain Useful Information
A key to being a progressive developer is increasing your skill base. By increasing your level of knowledge of your chosen language you improve your technical skill and prospects for future career moves. Working within the Interweb sphere there are a great many new technologies coming out on almost a daily basis. At first we all got fun out of ASP then it was onto .Net. Throw into that mix the wonders of AJAX and jQuery and you end up with some powerful tools at your disposal.
As I like reading books and find them a much more useful tool when learning than forums, blogs and God forbid Microsoft’s MSDN Library I took it upon myself to scour some of my favorite sites for a new book for skill improvement. Some of my usual suspects are Wrox, O’Reilly and Apress sites. They have a good base of beginners all the way to advanced books for learning greatness.
The reason I prefer this method over web content (usually with the exception of MSDN Library) is that a book can be taken anywhere with you and the generally have a simple logical solution to a problem. Not to mention you get to learn a bit more along the way during the process of exploration. Forums and blogs on code tips tend to be over bloated with re-used code and the same question being asked over and over again. You get the feeling that most users do not know how to use a search tool and would rather just post the same basic question again rather than check if it has been answered.
With a book you can find the answer or at least some guidance as to a logical solution thought process before having to trawl through endless forums that just repeat themselves.
I would have one criticism of those programmer books and that is the ‘where to go from here’ issue. This being that there are hundreds of beginner books out there on programming to get you on your way. Yet, once you have read all the code and gotten a full understanding there appears to be a shortage of advanced books to take you to the next level. They usually tend to spend the first 2 thirds explaining the basics of the language you already know before making some minor attempt towards the end to actually give you some more details. By this stage it can be easier to trawl the web for inspiration, buy a book you’re only going to half use or post a question on a blog that may have already been answered.
It’s a shame cause I think there would be great market out there for people who want to write books for ‘developers’ that are for developers. The kind of books that don’t need to spend 200 pages telling me how to say ‘Hello World’. That’s been done. Now is the time to do the ‘Create World’ program. Where is the book for that?
