also work many time in web development.

In my opinion, books like “PHP For Absolute Beginners” & the Dummies series are for people /w 6 months experience or less. You want something solid. Basically, you want to read something by O’Reilly, Addison Wesley, or Manning. You want something small to cover all the bases and get you enough context so the reference is easily understandable.

BTW-When I learned HTML, I started with a list of all the HTML tags, and simply created html files to see how each worked.

It wasn’t until I actually dived right into CSS (in particular) and struggled like hell with it, that I was able to comfortably write it. I do a ton of reading on programming, but I know for a fact that I need to be more “doing” in that area.

Thanks for the reminder Amber.

I’ll use the statement that Chris Pirillo often uses, “it depends.” On both the subject matter and how good the author is. A good author who knows his craft is going to make a book worth learning from. The key is knowing what a book will give you. You can’t master programming through a book, just like you can’t master physics from a book, but it sure helps to have it at hand! I study math from my texts and I really wouldn’t want to be without it.

I think the key is to read books (check reviews and google for reviews as well) and cross-check that information on blog posts and such. Books are one way of learning, but they can never be good or bad just by the merits of being a book. If the author doesn’t understand their code, they just shouldn’t be writing. Any technical book worth its salt should teach you the “reasoning” behind how mechanism works and proper optimization techniques.

Well, I love books. But since you wrote this in 09, not sure if it’s relevant to today. While I do like learning from books, I do realize that practice (like, ten years of practice according to Peter Norvig) is what allows me to master any field.