Great programming book offer.

General Discussions
#1

[quote]Packt Publishing are launching an exciting campaign to coincide with the release of our 2000th title. During this offer Packt is giving its reader a chance to dive into their comprehensive catalogue and avail a Buy One, Get One Free offer across their entire range of eBooks.
The campaign will continue up until 26th-Mar-2014. Following are the benefits readers can avail during this campaign.
[/quote]
I have history with Packt publish, because i got free copy of book “Learning Libgdx game development”. They are very supportive and helpful, always send me good opportunities to earn free ebooks, books.
If anyone is interested - [removed_link_with_affiliate_tracking]

Sorry if you think this is spam or waste of time for you, but maybe someone will be interested.
Thank you for your time!

#2

Could you explain what the point of this thread is? Something like get ebooks for free on that site?

#3

Deal is, Buy one, get one for free. Not bad.

#4

Not bad at all, considering reference type books often cost $50-60+
A while ago I picked up “Java: How to Program,” considered one of the ‘definitive’ java books, for $30 on amazon when it goes for ~$120 new, talk about a deal.

#5

Just an honest question, because I only own one java book currently. Why would you want to buy one of those expensive reference books when you can simply use google? I don’t mean that in a condescending way, I’m honestly curious why these books are superior to just using internet resources?

#6

@Rayvolution

It depends what you want to do. If you want to figure out a simple problem you have in your program, Google’s the way to go. But for learning new programming concepts or languages, books are often much better to learn from.

Mr. Somebody posting programming tutorials online could be anybody, whereas those expensive books are (usually) written by authors with lots of experience and knowledge in their field. The internet is a large patch-work of various resources contributed by any random somebody sitting in front of a computer. You may not find exactly what you need, or the author of said resource may not necessarily be doing what they’re doing very efficiently. Sometimes you may find book-quality information, but it’s not very common and hard to find. Fancy books (again, usually) contain all that nice high-quality information you rarely find online. They’re also more in-depth and cover a lot more material than a bunch of internet sources.

TL;DR: Books are written by authors who know what they’re doing. The internet is cats.

#7

Also, books typically (unless they’re specialized, I’m talking programming language X for dummies type stuff) have a fair amount of depth to them, all in one place. I’ve seen multiple instances where someone is developing something relatively complex, but then asks how basic concept X works. My theory is that they saw something on the internet and ran with it before figuring out the fundamentals, how it works, etc. That (largely) wouldn’t happen if they started with a comprehensive book.

Here is a review on that book I was talking about that says as much: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2IDRU4CCAZW9/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0132575663&nodeID=283155&store=books

Other reviews reflect similar views, and with better phrasing than I can quickly muster up here.

#8

Guess that makes sense, I actually have ran into a few problems googling around trying to learn. Sometimes you have odd specific questions that don’t seem to have any real straightforward answer so you can’t judge if Joe No.1 or Bob No. 13 are doing it the best possible way. With a book you have a better chance of someone who really knows what they’re talking about giving you the correct concepts/ideas right from the get-go.

I’ve also ran into similar problems to what you’re alluding to about fundamentals. Learning on the internet has put me in an odd spot. I’m very advanced in some areas, but in others (Like that HashMap discussion from last week) I’m still a novice in. I understand the concepts of say, HashMaps and know how to implement them. But it would be nice to have a true-blue pro tell me for-a-fact concepts and examples of when exactly proper time is to implement them is, and those are the sort of questions that the internet can’t help very well with because the guy you’re getting your info from could be a 14 year old kid or a seasoned 20+ year programming theory vet…

#9

The books recommended here are all really good for anyone looking to expand their knowledge.

Not to go too far off-topic, but that is the reason I really like class setups a lot. You get all the benefits of learning from a book, but more importantly you get the foundation of where a certain function may be useful in an application. When I learned from scratch, I had no clue how to use advanced loops or where to apply them. Most of my functions were garbage and inefficient. Even though online tutorials are well written, it is impossible to get “the big picture” that reading a book or attending a class does. It gives a lot of perspective to design, and that is very hard to do when working with a small set of challenges.

So yeah, the information may be vast… But, learning how to use it still requires one to be taught. I’ve always gained more broad knowledge from reading and class than online.

#10

That’s an excellent question to ask, more people should ask it.

Here is my view on the subject. There is more to information than just “data”. If information is not presented in the right order, context and with the appropriate backing examples leaving as little possibility to misinterpret as is possible, it becomes misinformation.

Good books present the information in a way you can easily and correctly absorb it. They’re written by humans, for humans.

Google is only built to provide you cold hard information. There is no plan, no guidance, no filter, no order; there is absolutely no system in place that takes into account that you’re a human with flaws. To properly absorb information in that state, you already need to have a solid base so you can do all the work that a book does for you yourself.

Long story short: in my opinion if you start with the internet as a complete novice, you are setting yourself up to learn the right things the wrong way.