Confessions of a cat

Well, there are lots of books published in the field of IT (as well).

Unfortunately most of them are crap. Thank god I haven’t spent that much money on IT books; as I have only bought a few of them, actually. 

There are lots of publishers as well, each with their own distinct (?) style. There’ apress, manning, o’reilly, packt, pragmatic bookshelf, etc. My favorites are manning and packt by the way. And pragmatic is good with its rails / ruby books, too.

Usually you can get the pdf from all of them, which is cheaper, and much faster to search / use. But that’s not what I am into right know.

Most of these books are not written by a professional who knows what he’s talking about _and_ also manages to convey knowledge in a digestible way. One of these properties is lacking. A sad fact of life, I know. And also on top of that there are lots of frameworks, and applications, technologies one can write a book about - usually the documentation is available for them …for free.

Well, sometimes a book is good, like in the case of the Pro Drupal Development (2007 by apress). This one manages to put crucial ideas and practical knowledge into a concise book. And if you have ever tried to get around on the drupal site, especially if you’re a beginner, well: good luck to you! This book is helpful.

I also liked the agile web development book which tries to teach partly by guiding you through the steps of creating an application. This is a good idea. It also contains enough references to get you started.

And now onto the bad side of things: I have managed to buy an ASP.NET 2.0 unleashed book like a year ago. I know, I am more into the open source side of things (apache, php5, rails, and so on) but I have this wanting to know about the “enemy” mentality as well. So this book is almost 2000 pages. I have only read the first 150 pages or so, and then ASP.NET 3.5 unleashed is out. I have not bought that one, but instead “googled” it. I got the pdf now. Opened it once so far…

I have bought a book in pdf from apress about rails plugins, opened it a few times so far. It’s OK. And I also have some books that my previous employer have bought (about java, they never used it, we thought we would, but nope so far) about design patterns and the basics of the language - they’re part of the “head start” series. These are good. With lots of funny text and illustrations. From O’reilly.

I have also read numerous books about .NET, Java, JSP, python, etc. Most of them were just time-wasters. So before you decide on buying anything, please have a good look around. Probably you should seek for some tutorials, or even better, buy some video tutorials in your chosen topic. Lynda and Total Training have lots of good video tutorials available. 

Books are good, but since we are usually sitting in front of our computers, just googling or reading the reference once you know what you’re up to is more often than not, enough.