Why I buy books.

[Kaydell Leavitt]

Everything is available online so why do I buy books?

Everything online is connected every-which way, that's why they call it "the Web". It's like a spider web.

Books, on the other-hand, are like a work of art. They are like a symphony. There is a beginning, an exposition, a middle, a development, and and end.

Good books have concept art on the cover and a summary on the back cover for initial study and for later review that can be done quickly.

Good books have a table-of-contents that you can start asking yourself what you know and what you don't know.

Good books have meaningful chapter names and section headings that cover concepts. With good books, you can read section headings and decide whethr to read the details or skip them.

Good books help you to "wrap-your-brain" around technology, to get the main ideas and have them on your bookshelf to come back to later, whenever you need the details.

Good books are like a hard-drive. They're your "secondary-storage". Without books, you're like a computer with only RAM and no hard-drive.

Buying and keeping good books, makes you a more effective developer.

Renting a website or renting eBooks is temporary, books are forever.

Kaydell

[Bert Bates]

yeah!

[Ulf Dittmer]

Originally posted by Bert Bates:
yeah!

... says the absolutely, positively, neutral-to-the-bone author

Another benefit: books are comfortable to read in the sense that they are 100% porch-, park- and travel-compatible, something I can't really say of laptops.

[Ilja Preuss]

Another advantage is that books serve more senses: at least touch and smell. I suspect that that helps me remember the things I have read.

[Christophe Verré]

I feel so passive reading something on a screen. And I can't concentrate, especially when connected to Internet. I need to hold the thing and turn pages to get immersed.

[Bear Bibeault]

You can more easily read books in bed. You can throw books into the saddlebags of your motorcycle. You can highlight important passages in books. You can put sticky notes on book pages. And so on...

[Ilja Preuss]

You can put book marks into books. You can write something on book marks. You can dog-ear books.

And last but not least, the "screen resolution" of books is yet to be beaten.

[Bert Bates]

I'm a fiend for more pixels - when I'm coding I typically have lots of paper in view - open books, code listings, and of course my monitor(s).

I like to think of books as "cheap pixels"

[Peer Reynders]

Originally posted by Bear Bibeault:
You can throw books into the saddlebags of your motorcycle.

Hmmmm... throwing!

You can throw a book at the person that should have been reading it in the first place.
(Expensive with a laptop (tends to have sharp corners) - then again, never throw a Head First book at anyone - way too heavy, way too much inertia resulting in harmful momentum).

You can throw a book across the hallway when you are frustrated with it.
(Again, expensive with a laptop - performed the book-toss only once (not something I do) but it had it coming - still couldn't warm up to Object Role Modeling).

But I really like real books that automatically come with e-books. That way my not-so-portable traveling library doesn't get any heavier.

[Kaydell Leavitt]

I am insignificant. I am only one thread in a multi-threaded universe, yet to me, I am everything. I can count on my books because they are immutable objects. Because of my books, I am thread-safe.

Kaydell
[ May 30, 2007: Message edited by: Kaydell Leavitt ]

[Theodore Casser]

Then again, there's just something to be said for having a resource lying around when the network decides to up and die on you in the middle of a project when you have no other idea how to accomplish a task...

[Joe San]

Satou, the same with me! I get distracted when I'm online..I can't read a 500 pager on the screen.

[Jenson Chew]

ooh, an interesting topic that I have missed here. Books are not so cheap here in Singapore. But I would like to have books too. Have been working for one whole day staring on the screen, can't afford to read any ebooks on screen at home.

This is another story if I were still a poor and stingy college student who prefers to spend his money on gadgets and entertainment

Now, I would love to see books that will benefits in my learning as well as work and projects lying around me. They'll make me feel good being surrounded and I only have a couple of books so far.

Why I'm learning slow in Java? Because I'm still learning from Java tutorial and I can't seems to be able to focus long enough on screen. I doze off whenever I read for more than 30 minutes. But I can't afford to sleep at work

[Vyas]

true. Agree - cant read on screen. But screen helps in easy notes too!

[Bear Bibeault]

"Vyas", you have previously been warned on multiple occasions regarding adjusting your display name to meet JavaRanch standards. This is not optional, and this is your final warning. Adjust your display name to comply with the required standards prior to your next post.

Failure to comply will result in the removal of your account.

bear
JavaRanch Sheriff