My age allows me start grumping. These young programmers don’t read books anymore.  They google. They argue, “When I need to find a solution it’s just a click away. Why bother purchasing books that are outdated by the time of printing?  Real programmers learn by doing – trial and errors”.

But I’ll tell you the real reason why they are no purchasing computer books – they are cheap. And as an old saying goes, “cheap pays twice”.  
This is how I look at it – if you found five useful pages in a book that saved you at least one hour of work, it’s already paid itself off. Do you make at least $30-40 an hour?  And one book averages the same amount. Get it? One saved hour is equal to one book price. Don’t agree? In this case you are not cheap. You are dirt cheap.

The lecturing part is over. Let me pick several books from my book shelf. They are listed in no particular order – I just like the way they are written and published.

1.    High Performance Web Sites by O’Reilly.  
This book is written by Steve Souders , a performance Yahoo! guy.  He came up with a set of rules to follow to make a Web site faster.  Even if you are not challenged with a task of fine tuning a Web site, this thin book will give you lots of insights about what’s going on under the hood of a commercial Web site.

2.   Enterprise Ajax by Prentice Hall.
If you’ve read at least a dozen of my blogs or articles, the chances are that one of them was about Ajax being a bad choice for enterprise development. Yes, this remains my position, which does not mean that I do not read books about AJAX.  When smart people start using a painful set of techniques to develop an enterprise application, they have to overcome challenges on a daily basis.  Then some of them write books sharing their findings. Why not learn from their experience? This is one of the rare AJAX books that is not boring. It gives you an intro to AJAX programming and a  good overview of a development cycle of enterprise applications with such an unpleasant weapon as AJAX.

3.    Continuing the subject of books about Web applications, I’d like to mention again a good tutorial on Javascript by No Starch Press. It’s called “The book of JavaScript. Second Edition”.
It’s a well written and published book on basics of modern JavaScript. Last year I’ve interviewed the author of this book. This interview is located here.

4.    Java Fundamentals I and II by Prentice Hall.
If you’ve been around in the industry for a while, you remember excellent and colorful books by Deitel and Associates. I have not seen them for a while though.  But this one is not exactly a book, but a multimedia item, which includes more than fourteen hours of video lessons on Java.
Paul Deitel accompanied these videos/screencasts with printed source code of all examples.
Learn Java, repeat after Paul. He knows how to teach programming.

5.    Founders at Work by aprèss.
This book is about business of programming, a subject that is often more interesting than the programming itself. It has thirty two chapters, which are thirty two interviews with people like Joel Spolsky, Paul Graham, Steve Wozniak and many other good software engineers and successful entrepreneurs.  Keep this book on your night table and something good will definitely come out of it.

6.    Learning ActionScript 3.0. A beginner’s guide by O’Reilly.
I bought this book last week, and this is the fourth book on this language that I’ve purchased during the last year.  I am not exactly the beginner here, but this book is written well and printed in color, I just could not stop myself and bought it. The authors of the book mainly address the crowd of Flash programmers gently introducing them to more object-oriented way of programming with ActionScript. But this book is useful even for people who are traditional enterprise software developers that are trying to walk on unfamiliar grounds of visual programming. I found a lot of new (to me) and useful information in this book.

7.    Beginning Spring 2. From Novice to Professional by aprèss.
Spring framework is the most popular framework among the Java enterprise programmers. If you want to find a quick and up to the point overview of the Spring framework, this 150-page book is a way to go.

8.    SQL for Smarties, third edition by Morgan Kaufmann.
This is not exactly a new addition to my book shelf. I bought the first edition of this book by outstanding Joe Celko more than ten years ago. I am one of these die-hard people who prefer SQL to Hibernate.  There are not too many people in the world who understand SQL like Joe does. He signed and gave me the third edition of this book a couple of years ago, and I’m honored. When I read these kids' declarations that “I’d rather google then purchase an outdated book”, I just smile.  This is one of the books that won’t be outdated in the foreseeable future. Remember, google helps when you know what to look for. But sometimes you just don't, and it's better to rely on other people who did their research to weed out real gems for your consumption.

9.    If you are one of these lucky Java geeks who get to go to JavaOne next week, check out the book store that operates right on premises. This is one of the seldom occasions when you can meet and greet the well-known and respected authors. Check out the signing book schedule there and find the author you’d like to meet in flesh. If I’d be there, I’d definitely picked a copy of the second edition of the Effective Java by Addison-Wesley. This is what James Gosling wrote about this book: “I sure wish I had this book ten years ago. Some might think that I don’t need any Java books, but I need this one.” Josh Bloch will be there in person and you can get your copy of this book signed.

10.    I’d like to use this opportunity and introduce my new electronic book called “Enterprise Software without the BS”. This politically incorrect book shows you my view of what it takes to be an enterprise developer.  I’ll be sharing my view on advancing your career in the enterprise IT, looking for jobs, preparing for the interviews, comparing incomes of employees and contractors, political stuff and more. This small book is available for free download over here.

I know that publishing industry is rapidly changing. People read books online, they download them into Kindles, iPods, and other electronic gadgets. If you prefer this format of book delivery, fine. Just do not stop reading.