[leostatic]

>I read A LOT. Like 3-4 technical books a month

Could you please elaborate on this? As in, what kind of books do you look for? I have developed this feeling that focussed blog posts by experienced programmers teaches more than books. Also, there are way too many self published authors out there. I know it's a good thing in a way but with so many books, it gets tough to figure out which ones are worth your time. In other words, I'm looking for an example like "I wanted to learn x, so looked up and read y". Thanks.

[jaegerpicker]

Sure, I tend to target books I see mentioned on twitter. Then I also tend to stick to books by O'Reilly, Pragmatic Programmers, and Manning. I've found there quality of books to be much higher in general to others. Then I tend to try and find books that are written by a blog author or the library/open source project that I like. For instance Chas Emerick is pretty well know in the Clojure circles, has a good blog and a good twitter account, he has also written a book on Clojure for O'reilly so I picked it up. Then I've seen the PragPub book about Web Development in Clojure and I've seen at least 3 other people on twitter mention it positively so that was book number 2 for that month. For number three I took a chance and picked up a self published book, Functional Programming for the Object Oriented Programmer because it covered Clojure and I'm mostly an OO Programmer so it completed my deep dive into Clojure for that month. I don't always dive so deep on a subject but last month was my learn Clojure month :).