How to choose it books

I mentioned in "how to become a good developer [2]: About self-learning ability"Okay.The importance of IT books. Let's talk about the identification methods of technical books today. Assume that you have just prepared an e-book or want to purchase it in a bookstore, but you are not sure about the quality of the book. The following tips can help you.

1st tips:View online comments
First, go to some authoritative book websites to see how everyone thinks (believe that the eyes of the masses are bright ). For English books, I usually go to the Amazon website to see them; for Chinese books, I go to douban.com. Both websites provide star rating, which is generally equal to or greater than 4 stars. (This trick is not necessarily applicable to the bookstore, unless you bring something online with you)

2nd tips:View author
The importance of book authors is needless to say. According to the principle, most of the good books are written by a few excellent authors. If the author is a technical leader in the field or a well-known critic, the quality of the book is generally not too bad. However, to use this trick, you must first have a certain understanding of the fields in which this book is located, and know who belongs to this field.

3rd tips:View publishing information
The publishing information mainly depends on the publishing house and the publishing time. The overall level of books published by good publishers is still good, so there will be no abuse and fewer typographical errors.
The importance of publishing time depends on specific fields. For example, some fields (Algorithm, Software engineering, etc.), not time sensitive. Even a long time ago (for example, the mythical man-month was published in 1975 ). Other fields (involving specific languages, software, and operating systems) need to keep pace with the times. Books published three to five years ago may be outdated.
If it is a paper version, you can also check the number of revisions and the number of prints. These two indicators are generally proportional to the sales volume. However, it is not ruled out that a few good books with spring snow are sold very low. Therefore, these two indicators are for reference only.

4th tips:View directory
After reading the published information, you can take a rough look at the directory. You can learn a lot from the directory. The directories of good books are generally well-organized and clear. Abuse of books is vice versa.
You can also get a rough idea of the depth of the book and the distribution of its content in the shortest time (depending on how many pages each chapter occupies) to determine whether the book is suitable for you.
For example, I have read an Object-Oriented Java programming book written by a Chinese author. I opened the Directory and scanned it. The whole book is about Java syntax. I only mentioned OO in one of the chapters, the percentage of pages in the book is less than 10% (I strongly doubt whether the author has obtained Sun's Java language specification for a moment and published it ).

5th tips:Spot check pages
Finally, you can take a look at a section in the book. Check whether the author's pen is fluent and vivid. If it is a translation book, pay attention to the level of translation. Quality of translated booksAt the same timeIt depends on the level of the author and the translator. If no one works, the whole book won't go anywhere.
When I studied MFC earlier in the year, I read a translation book and translated the "DOC/View" of MFC into "document view. Therefore, if you can read the original work, try to read it as much as possible to avoid being taken into the trap by poor translators.

The selection of IT technology books is now available. In the future, I plan to occasionally recommend some classic books to column Readers. All posts related to book reviews are here.

Http://program-think.blogspot.com/2009/01/choose-it-book.html