 | Head First Design Patterns by Elisabeth Freeman
Buy new: $29.67 / Used from: $15.90 I found this one to be the most enlightening book this year due to its focus on good object-oriented programming principles.
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 | Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design by Brett D. McLaughlin
Buy new: $31.49 / Used from: $19.94 Provides a heavy emphasis on requirements analysis and light on object-oriented programming principles.
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 | C# 3.0 Design Patterns by Judith Bishop
Buy new: $26.39 / Used from: $18.68 C# implementations of the classic design patterns, although some are done somewhat differently, such as the Template Method pattern
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 | Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma
Buy new: $37.79 / Used from: $26.95 Great read after Head First Design Patterns.
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 | MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide by Paul DuBois
Buy new: $40.94 / Used from: $36.99 In my opinion, several topics were treated lightly and forward-referenced to later chapters in the book, which presented the same light treatment and not the detail I was hoping for. Overall, not too bad though.
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 | Programming C# 3.0 by Jesse Liberty
Buy new: $31.49 / Used from: $19.99 I didn't like the style of this one. It aims at the complete beginner and pro at the same time. Some early parts of the book are beginner simple, but then it suddenly moves to more complex examples with little to no expalanation.
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 | Beginning Ajax (Programmer to Programmer) by Chris Ullman
Buy new: $30.39 / Used from: $2.32 OK for getting the basics on AJAX, but I think it has an over-emphasis on using third party libraries, with little to no explanation of how they work internally.
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 | Head First Servlets and JSP
Buy used from: $20.00 Great introduction to servlets and JSP; however, there were times I wish it went more in depth. The philosophy is, if it's not on the exam, don't worry about it.
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 | PHP Phrasebook by Christian Wenz
Buy new: $21.36 / Used from: $10.00 Of little value; you'll learn more reading the manual a few minutes a day than messing with this one.
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 | The PHP Anthology: Object Oriented PHP Solution, Volume 1 by Harry Fuecks
Buy used from: $2.24 Despite "PHP 5" on the front cover, it covers no PHP 5. It hints that certain features will be in PHP 5, such as exceptions; but no PHP code presented is PHP 5-only.
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 | Professional Perl Programming by Peter Wainwright
Buy used from: $1.40 Great book on Perl, very thorough and excellent explanations. Overall one of the best reads of the year.
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 | UML Demystified by Paul Kimmel
Buy new: $17.12 / Used from: $5.04 UML is visual. This book needed more diagrams.
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 | Schaum's Outline sof Data Structures with Java by John Hubbard
Buy used from: $4.94 Overall I liked this book; concrete examples are given in Java. I used to loathe pseudocode, but I think it would've benefited this book if it gave psuedocode before the conrete Java implementations. It would've made figuring out the algorithms easier.
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 | Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch
Buy new: $34.64 / Used from: $32.97 A lot of common sense Java you should already know. I was unenlightend. However, it is good teaching some of the of the newest Java features, such as generics and enums.
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 | The Ultimate HTML Reference by Ian Lloyd
Buy new: $29.67 / Used from: $39.89 Decent, but would've been nice with more visual examples.
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 | The Ultimate CSS Reference by Tommy Olsson
Buy new: $24.23 / Used from: $20.00 Teaches CSS in addition to providing a reference manual. Would've been nice to have more visual examples.
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 | JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
Buy new: $19.79 / Used from: $13.99 Good if you want to learn how to do OO in JavaScript. Quick read.
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 | php|architect's Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide by Davey Shafik
Buy new: $29.69 / Used from: $25.25 Light treatment of PHP. Not good as an everyday reference or learning in depth about PHP.
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 | C# for Java Programmers by Harold Cabrera
Buy new: $36.68 / Used from: $3.49 Great comparison between Java and C#. Helped me quickly start using C#.
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 | CompTIA A+ Certification All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)) by Glen E. Clarke
Buy used from: $15.14 Cleared a lot of misconceptions I had about a few hardware and network-related issues.
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