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Buying books

Roy has a very interesting post about buying books - I thought I'd add a few words here:

  • If you have a management who is reluctant in buying books - you must reconsider. Remember the old adage? If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Budgeting helps - perhaps with a “group think“ and topics where the dev team decides which ones to buy.
  • Tech books are notorious in becoming obsolete very fast. Some classics pervail and should be on the shelves anyway (e.g., GOF Patterns, Davis' 201 Principles, etc). Lately, there have been quite a few “cookbooks“. (OReilly has a series that includes C#, ADO.Net & ASP.Net and there are others from MS Press). I have found these are useful especially, if you have .NET newbies in the dev team. One or two recipes from these cookbooks, invariably pays for itself so they are worth it.
  • Always try the cheaper shops first - Used or 3rd party merchants on Amazon, BookPool, etc. BORDERS bookstores has a corporate discount card (~20%) that can be obtained by your management (for free!) and that helps (if you include the cost of shipping & handling for online sales).

Lastly, if you buy from Amazon - make sure you go through Roy's Amazon Associate link .. :-)