books : Java Glossary

Finding Roedy’s Recommended Books

If you have Google Desktop installed and if you are reading a local mirror copy of my website provided via the Replicator, you can do a Google desktop search with: filetype:html "recommend book", (note the exact-search quotes) and Google Desktop will find you my book referrals sprinkled throughout the mindprod.com site, about whatever other search criteria you add. Note the spelling of recommend — one c, two ms, not reccommend or recomend or reccommend. You have to spell it exactly in the form of a command: "recommend book", not "recommend books" or "recommended book" or "recommend a book".

This feature will also kick in later using an ordinary web browser Google.com site search with site:mindprod.com "recommend book" for people who browse the ordinary way, when Google next indexes the mindprod.com website.

Incidentally, Google Desktop will let you find anything else on the mindprod.com website with indexes that are only seconds out of date.

You can similarly find my DVD (Digital Video Disc) recommendations with filetype:html "recommend DVD" in Google Desktop and site:mindprod.com "recommend book" in an ordinary web browser Google site search.

You can also use Google Books to search for books and browse them online to various degrees. You can also use or Copernic, which I find generally faster and more reliable that Google Desktop. Just search for recommend book without quotes. You might optionally set the filetype to html to narrow the search.

Selecting Books

• fluff, material you can get elsewhere such as the Javadoc for Swing.
• stuff that is too obvious.
• stuff obviously way over your head. It should be a stretch, but not a leap.

• Lots of example code, especially complete programs you can run and tinker with. Sometimes they come on a CD (Compact Disc).
• a good index. Try looking up a few things of current interest.
• chapter summaries.

The most useful tend to be the O’Reilly books which have good depth on a narrow topic.

The map below shows the number of books published in 1990. The fatter a country is shown relative to its actual size, the more it published.

© Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan)