Let's be honest. Many of us have books that were bought thinking "I might need this some day". That day has never come.
Or maybe you spent $50+ on the book but only used it a few times.
Or you bought it thinking it was the current technological trend.
Post your list of books that you have but have never read, let alone used for a project.
Only put books related to your work. Tech books!
I have McGraw's security box set. So far, I'm only half way through the "black hat" book (Exploiting Software). I haven't even started the "white hat" book or the "ying-yang" book yet.
C# 3.0 in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference. The only time i've used it is when i was doing some threading stuff. saved my butt though (threading hurts my heart).
The Art of Computer Programming by Knuth. To be fair, I got partially through the first volume, but it's just too abstract and hard to follow. There's a reason Bill Gates was quoted as saying:
"If you think you're a really good programmer […] read (Knuth's) Art of Computer Programming […] You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing."
I've been meaning to read "Modern C++ Design" for some years, and finally got around to buying it, when I started working in C++ again after a few year on C#. But I only got a few chapters in when that contract ended, and my new job was C# again.
"Do you really need this book?" by John Smith. It has the subtitle "Learn how to avoid buying books you won't read".
It's a made-up book, but I'm sure many of us would buy it - and not read it - if it existed.
"Spring: A Developer's Notebook".
Moving a well-designed plain-ordinary-Java-object (POJO) application to Spring is straightforward. It only takes three steps:
Refactor your code to take advantage of dependency injection. Model objects are beans, and services are aspects. Usually, you'll only have beans.
Remove the code that instantiates the objects and sets dependencies.
Build a configuration file describing your beans and aspects.
Access your code through Spring.
Since our individual parts are already built to take advantage of dependency injection, moving to Spring is an easy exercise. We simply replace our assembler with a Spring version, and provide a configuration file which will go in the \war\WEB-INF folder. Example 1-9 shows the configuration file.
(thousands of bytes of XML)
It was a few months after wading through nine circles of JAR hell that I realized a better life existed and became a rails programmer.
Programming Microsoft Visual C# 2008: The Language
Technically the company bought it, but I have never even cracked it open.
I'm not proud but... Code Complete. I'm sad that I didn't had time to read that one. That one and "Introduction to VB.NET" :)
Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6 in 24 Hours - No idea why I bought it. I don't do VB, never have and probably never will.
Better, Faster, Lighter Java - Didn't get past the table of contents, it didn't seem to be particularly enlightening, just repeating stuff I'd read elsewhere.
Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 in VB 2005
Considering that I learned all I needed to know online, it's already out of date, and that I'm now a C# developer anyway, that was kind of an ill-advised purchase.
Read the first few chapters but it was sooooo dated. I recommend that if you feel the urge to buy it just to read the Wikipedia page. It contains the whole book in <2 pages.
Death March. It depressed me greatly and I couldn't continue. To be fair, it was the 1st edition that I grabbed for $5.
Introduction to Algorithm, after numerous few attempts and many huh? later. it's a pretty paperweight for now :(
concrete mathematics, Knuth
I keep meaning to sit down with it, but never do.
I am a bit ashamed of this, but I bought the original GOF Design Patterns book and never found enough (time | will | strength | need) to read it. I'll sell it for £15, anyone interested? ;)
You may frown upon this but I actually read the whole Headfirst: Design Patterns book and found it so easy to follow that when I later grabbed the GOF copy, I couldn't quite adjust to the very dry and fact like style it's written in.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
I hate to admit it, because I really want to read it... but I just can't seem to find time to get very far into it. You can toss The Mind's I and other Hofstadter books in with it, but mostly that one is the one I'm ashamed to have collecting dust.
W. Richard Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated and Unix Network Programming sets. I own them all and have used them for periodic reference, but I think these are right up there with the Knuth books...
Swarm Intelligence. Baught during short period of excitement about AI and it sounded cool and mysterious, but after reading a few pages I realized it's not relevant to my work and got bored quickly reading non-relevant stuff.
There are > 8.000 books there I have never read, and even though I probably under-use my subscription, I find that having instant access to this reference library a few times each month when Google does not provide the best answer is worth the subscription fee.