How to pick a good programming book to learn?

[shivajikobardan]

For a moment, please keep aside the discussion whether you really need books to learn programming.

Generally the reviews online are highly confusing. If you start reading all negative and positive reviews, you'd be forever confused.

So, how do you pick good programming books?

Last time I picked "CSS Cookbook" to learn CSS. (I knew the basics already). The book was good but it was outdated beyond my thought. No flexbox, no grids, no animations. It was written in 2009.

 

[menator01]

Not saying books are bad (I still use some I bought in the 90's) as a reference. I mainly look for codes of interest on the web. I am a member of two forums. Both are really good places for learning. Language docs are always a good place. Most provide examples of code to work with. Just my thoughts.

 

[shivajikobardan]

which another forum (or anything that's good)?

 

[menator01]

That would depend on the coding language you are interested in learning.
I like this forum because it has a variety of languages and I think I've helped a few people here. I have been a member of the python-forum.io for several years now. I have learned a lot from there about python. I a member of the old devshed forum for a long time until they changed over. Think it's been shutdown now.
Most all forums have people that will help and give advice. Like I said just depends on the language you are learning. This one has active users that don't mind helping. There is the banner on the forum with youtube tutorials as well.

 

[Deleted member 2829]

I found the O'Reilly books always to be very good. The problem with books of course is that they age so quickly. Finding a book that if both good AND really up tp date might be next to impossible. If you picked a book from 2009 you could have guessed it was grossly outdated. Then again, it might be great for learning the basics insofar as they had not changed. For example I might still pick up my "JAVA in a Nutshell" book from 1997 to check some or other basic functionality. Even though 90% of current stuff isn't in it 😀

 

[shivajikobardan]

the problem with that book is that it's not a basics book. it's cookbook. so, it gets outdated like crazy. only 200 pages where basics are covered isn't outdated.

 

[Deleted member 5997]

Because books get outdated quickly I'd steer clear of books on specific subjects such as languages. On the other hand, there are books that I consider to be (almost) timeless, such as: "Code Complete", "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" and "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code".