More often than not I find myself in a situation where I need to learn a technology in a short period of time and I find myself wasting time trying to figure out with docs will teach me something and which wont. It boils down to this:
to learn something quick, I need a comprehensive reference I can rely on. PHP.net, perldocs, java.sun.com are such references.
On the other hand other languages or technologies do not have official documents covering every single aspect:
Ruby, python, C++, twisted, rails, most of linux distros, etc. are such cases.
In these cases I kind of hope a book can play that role, but I find it particularly difficult to tell if a book is good or not before using it for a while.
I opened this topic hopping to get a bit of different points of view and opinios on different book series and labels:
I've red books of almost all these series and publishers:
- wiley (wrox, for dummies, bibles, ... )
- OReilly(head first, cookbooks, pocket references, in a nutshell, etc)
- Apress (appears to loosely catalog by titles like "beginning with XPTO", "advanced XPTO", "Pro XPTO" )
- pragmatic programmers bookshelf
- packt
- hanning
I would very much appreciate feedback and opinions about the above book publishers and/or series. Or about others of course.
If you would have to pick a book about a certain technology just by looking at the cover, which one would you pick? Why?