As I'm a librarian I'm extremely interested in what people will suggest. The opinion of practitioners is a lot more relevent than that of book reviewers.
Is it a University library or a public library? What your public will want will vary dramatically depending on who your primary audience is.
Back (not so long ago) when I was a kid I spent ages reading reading a book about programming in BASIC on the BBC and it was packed full illustrations (I can't remember much more about it other than it hard a part talking about how you needed to type """ if you wanted to get a quote).
When I look at the stuff being returned to the library at the University I am at it see
It is a mid-sized public library northwest of Chicago (www.lvdl.org). We serve about 35,000 people... and circulated over 1,000,000 items last year.
But we can do better.:-)
Personally I really liked the Mythical Man Month (one of the few library books I borrowed as an undergraduate and I've recently reread it and still like it) and Peopleware (very funny) but both of these are more about software engineering (and how it goes wrong) rather than practical hands on programming. However they are both short and entertaining. Code Complete is very authoritative (but big). These aren't books you are going to gravitate towards if you are just starting to program for the first time though so I'll just mention I found Java in Nutshell useful (but others are not so keen on it [livejournal.com]).
Your borrowers are probably going to want those "Learn in 24 hours..." or "...for Dummies" though. It would be nice to know what the most loaned books turned out to be in year's time (might make a good Slashdot article : )
Heh. That's why I'm interested in what the experts (you all) have to say. It's trivial to find a list of best computer books, hard to find the ones people believe in.
I have a copy of C++ For Dummies on one of my shelves at work, but mostly because the author is a really nice guy and lived in the same suite in my freshman year... Most of my actual programming work was in higher level database languages.
Even though I don't do any serious programming these days, I still dabble a bit, and the other programming language books on hand include Programming perl (the camel book), Using JavaScript, and IBM WebSphere Starter Kit.
How much net work could a network work, if a network could net work?
Best books? (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is your library and what type is it? (Score:1)
Is it a University library or a public library? What your public will want will vary dramatically depending on who your primary audience is.
Back (not so long ago) when I was a kid I spent ages reading reading a book about programming in BASIC on the BBC and it was packed full illustrations (I can't remember much more about it other than it hard a part talking about how you needed to type """ if you wanted to get a quote).
When I look at the stuff being returned to the library at the University I am at it see
Re: (Score:1)
If you want to go by the list (Score:3, Informative)
You might want to take a look at Top 100 Best Software Engineering Books, Ever [google.com] (if you want to go by what is popular) or The Best Programming Books [programmingbooks.org] (which seems to be more diverse).
Personally I really liked the Mythical Man Month (one of the few library books I borrowed as an undergraduate and I've recently reread it and still like it) and Peopleware (very funny) but both of these are more about software engineering (and how it goes wrong) rather than practical hands on programming. However they are both short and entertaining. Code Complete is very authoritative (but big). These aren't books you are going to gravitate towards if you are just starting to program for the first time though so I'll just mention I found Java in Nutshell useful (but others are not so keen on it [livejournal.com]).
Your borrowers are probably going to want those "Learn in 24 hours..." or "...for Dummies" though. It would be nice to know what the most loaned books turned out to be in year's time (might make a good Slashdot article : )
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I have a copy of C++ For Dummies on one of my shelves at work, but mostly because the author is a really nice guy and lived in the same suite in my freshman year... Most of my actual programming work was in higher level database languages.
Even though I don't do any serious programming these days, I still dabble a bit, and the other programming language books on hand include Programming perl (the camel book), Using JavaScript , and IBM WebSphere Starter Kit .