What are the best progamming book series?

Question

Which series do you really like? Which one, when it releases a new book, are you confident that it will be useful, well-written, etc?

Answer 1

If its by oreilly, and its blue, it covers .net well.

If its oreilly and its got an animal on it, it tends to cover its subject well.

http://oreilly.com/

Answer 2

O'Reilly is consistently good. Some of the SAMS books are good as well. I will usually spend several minutes checking out the index of the book I'm thinking of buying; I find that I use it much more than the table of contents. If the index is well organized and I can hit the topics I need quickly and get good results I might buy the book.

A lot depends on your intent with the book as well. If it's for learning you need to spend some time and scan the chapters - are they written in a manner that you comprehend easily? Are the code samples/diagrams easy to follow and well documented?

If you're buying it as a reference does it come with a dvd or online companion site? Are the code samples in the book well commented and written in a language you can read (i.e. vb.net vs. c#).

Lastly, what do the online sites say about it from a reviewer standpoint. I place that last because book reviews are generally a mixed back unless the book is a solid 5 or 1 star with multiple reviews (greater than 20). Anything between a 2 and a 4 and it's too subjective for me.

Answer 3

For languages, oreilly. For more general comp-sci, MIT press.

Answer 4

I've been a fan of The Pragmatic Bookshelf books.

My experience with them has been their Ruby books, Textmate Power Editing, and the classic Pragmatic Programmer. They have always seemed to hit my sweet spot.

Answer 5

I have a safari account. That way you get to choose the book.

But to answer the question more directly, I've always had luck with O'Reilly.

Answer 6

All computer books are not created equal.

• For theory - The Art of Computer Programming, hands down, but very hard to read at times. Best in small doses.
• For reference - I have found the "In a nutshell" books to be useful, but sometimes they are inconstant in that some languages get a better reference than others.

Outside of that, my bookshelf tends to be a bit scattered and I don't have a favorite series for general learning.

Answer 7

As mentioned O'Reilly (http://oreilly.com/) and the Pragmatic bookshelf (http://www.pragprog.com/titles) are really great libraries to choose from.

In the past I really got a lot from books published by Sitepoint, they are a web development community and publisher. - http://www.sitepoint.com/books/

Also I have found many Wrox titles that were really useful as learning reads as well as references. - http://wrox.com

happy shopping!

Answer 8

I like the Martin Fowler signature series -- Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture etc. I think its Addison Wesley. Good material and platform agnostic.

Answer 9

Over the years, almost everything I've read from O'Reilly has been at least very good and often excellent.

More recently I've had a number of very good books from Apress, although they're not as consistently good as O'Reilly.

Answer 10

I like the Head First Series from O'Reilly. They provide a funny way to learn complex informations

Answer 11

I recommend the "Pocket Reference" guides by O'Reilly. They are excellent sources of quick reminders and are setup so you can easily browse through them to get a concept that you know you know, but just can't remember what that keyword is called.

The other good thing about them is they are cheap. Usually $9.99 at retail, or around $1 used from Amazon. Amazon's a good place to check for them because they tend to have a lot of very specific Pocket References that aren't normally carried in the bookstores like Borders/BN, such as JSPs, Struts, etc.