I recently graduated, as a learn in pick up new things in the workspace, I find myself constantly buying more and more reference books for learning. Which can be a hassle to carry around.
How is the selection of technical books on the amazon kindle? If not do you recommend any other book reader?
I am sorry if it isn't appropriate place for this question.
Please and thank you.
I would not recommend the Kindle - I would recommend the Barnes and Noble Nook eReader.
Kindle does not support the new standard format for ebooks, EPUB. A new 3rd generation Kindle was recently announced, and still without support for this standard.
Nook supports EPUB (and still handles other formats like PDF).
I obtain most of my programming ebooks from O'Reilly, and they are making a big push to get all of them available in EPUB. I recently purchased their CSS book when it was only available in PDF, and a few weeks ago I received an email stating that it was now available in EPUB, and I was able to download it free of charge.
If I had to guess I would say that most new programming books are going to be available in EPUB format, and in that case you do not want a Kindle.
There are two big issues with programming books and eReaders:
From my experience on the Kindle, code blocks get mangled and split apart which makes it difficult to read and understand. Many books have purposely pushed/pulled text around code blocks to format it properly.
The best way to retain the formatting (that I've seen) is to have the eBook in PDF format. This way, the text is "exactly" like the book. This is where size comes in. The smaller Kindle (and I would assume Nook) are too small to render the full page on the screen. It's like taking a full-page text book and shrinking it to the size of a paperback. Unless you have excellent eye sight, the text is just too small.
One way to solve this is to go with the larger Kindle DX. This will get the PDF to be about the same size as the original book. In fact, if you look at certain books in the Amazon Kindle store, you may notice a little warning that the book is "enhanced for DX" (or something like that). That is a good indication there is special formatting that needs the big screen.
Personally, for all other books, I buy Kindle. Programming books are still paper (until the price of the Kindle DX comes down).