The Referencing

How many books do you typically pick up for a new (ad)venture like learning some new technology? I get too many, myself. I always have. It’s a habit I am trying to break.

When I learned all of this Web stuff, I was a freelance writer, and contracted with both General Electric and Microsoft to run a couple of their online forums. I could do this from anywhere, at any time, along with my writing, so it worked great for a few years. But when it came to learning something new, like this new-fangled markup language HTML, it was hard for me because when I most-often had questions, it was at about 2:30am. And remember, I lived not in Silicon Valley, but in Nebraska. So if I didn’t understand something, I was well and truly hosed until someone woke up and logged-on, who also happened to know more about it than me and was willing to help. Those are tiny odds. That kind of environment will just naturally slow a fella down.

And so I came to be a fan of Buying Too Many Books. If I didn’t understand the way material was presented in Learn HTML in 24Hrs, maybe I could make something of the same section in Teach Yourself HTML in 24Hrs or HTML for Dummies or The QuickStart Guide to HTML or HTML in a Nutshell or one of the other titles. When I started this, most books were at or under $20, and I would gladly have paid that much to have someone to ask in the tiny hours of the morning, so to me it made sense.

I recommend you buy only two books, however. At the most. Mark Twain said “The man with a watch always knows what time it is; The man with two watches is never quite sure”. This holds for books, as well.

If all you have is Ain’t We Got HTML? you can get a very good grasp of the issues at hand by reading and understanding it. But when you toss in HTML for Days you start carving up a very different pie. One slice will be Things You Already Knew. Some huge percentage of this new second book is going to be review, in other words. I would place those pages just slightly above the level of Wasted Money. Another slice is going to be Things You Didn’t Know. This is the real value in any second book, things it may have taken you years to pick up on your own, or things you may have just missed entirely. But there’s another final slice: Things You Thought You Knew That Are Wrong. See, one book is going to tell you to always do something, and the other book is going to tell you to never do it. It is then up to you to determine which book is right, and why.

As you add more books, those slices change size relative to one another, even as you continue to “make the pie higher”. Stir in three or four books, and you quickly get to the point of diminishing returns as far as new information goes. But there will be ways that another author explains things that might resonate with you. Still, there is even more opportunity for conflicting information.

I have had the advantage of having writerly relationships with various publishers and so I got a lot of my books free or at greatly reduced cost. And here at work there is a tiny little line-item in the budget devoted to increasing Mark’s technical kuh-nowledge, so I have the job pick up a book now and again.

The last book I personally bought was one of the learning JavaScript titles. Right now, though, I have only a single book for JQuery. And I have only a single book about Drupal. We’ll have to see how long that lasts.