You've already mentioned the Mims notebooks, which I think are at the top of my list. But I also think the Evil Genius guides are pretty fun and enlightening. For programming, I like Mastering Algorithms with C, Mastering Algorithms with Perl, Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang, and Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Python.
Mind me asking where in South Texas? Austin here. I have quite a few technical books lying around and plenty of colleagues who likely do as well.
I'm having a hard time picking out what it is about Armstrong's complaint about OOPL and ubiquitous data structures that indicates any lack of understanding on his part. Could you explain?
It's not an ad hominem to point out an inconsistency. If your argument is a fair one, then it ought to apply to something that's more immediate to you. The point is that most of the time, it's much easier to say something is worthless if it's more important to somebody else or some other group than yourself or the groups you consider yourself a member of.
I notice your tendency to lecture other commenters and throw down links (usually to Wikipedia, which is precious), so I feel comfortable talking this way to you. I appreciate the link to the guidelines, but I can go through them with you some time so it's clear I didn't violate any of them. I'd say anything I said here to your face, happily and as courteously as possible.
It's funny that you find it fitting to try to hold internet court and talk down to commenters who are making very valid points and pretend you're winning arguments because of those trusty Wikipedia articles. But your arguments aren't that good, with the Wikisalt and Wikipepper or without them. The point here is that the community benefits from pooling resources for a shared service. The benefit is demonstrated daily in real utility in the very real lives of very real people. It is quite arguably much less abstract than any good, public or private, provided by those nebulous NSF grants you got so sensitive about. I think you understand very well that we're talking about shared services that don't lend themselves to provision on a for-profit basis. But I think, judging by your mountain of pedantic comments, you'd much prefer to pretend you don't and keep splitting hairs and posting Wikipedia links.
The rhetoric here in this latest comment is pretty classic internet-libertarian nonsense in the classic internet-libertarian shit-eating seriously-I'm-really-smart-Mom tenor, talking about how I want other people to pay for things I want. Who do you think you are? You want to live on a libertarian island? Take your superior intellect and your gone-Galt friends and start building. At some point, people are going to want some services. And you'll be right back in a town hall meeting where some people will have come to their senses and arrived at the obvious conclusion: communities are a good thing and require cooperation and shared services. I'm sure that some of your crew, perhaps yourself included, will go on with this I'm-an-island act, but at that point a large percentage of your own internet-libertarian brethren will have grown oh so weary of the whole schtick and come to another obvious conclusion: it's really not a philosophy at all but rather a thin pretense for being an asshole. It's a self-sanctioning of your own shallowness and selfishness and immorality. If you believe the highest good is to never contribute to anything shared, then I hope, and feel confident, that you'll largely get your wish.
I'd like to be more friendly here, but I've grown very tired of being lectured everywhere on the internet by people of your mind. I think there are really very few of you (the Universe is merciful in this regard, I hope), but you are a whining screeching loud bunch. You can go Galt. I hope you do it very fast and very far away from the rest of us who like public libraries and good public schools for all children and decent streets and sidewalks and sanitation and all the other thousands of things that we all depend on. If you don't like nice things for everybody, that's fine. Don't use them. But, for the love of all that is holy, stop trying to convince yourself and the rest of us that your greed and selfishness and neighbor-loathing is somehow virtue.
First, let it be said that reading through your comments in this thread has driven me to drinking. I'm heading out to the local watering hole, but, before I do, I want to make a couple of points.
First, a library is most assuredly a public good in that it provides services that it can only provide which are not directed at profit-making. It serves many civic purposes and provides many services to the community. This is empirically true. It can be observed. Go to a public library in a city center and you will observe these functions being carried out to the great good of the patrons and the community at large. Your links to Wikipedia notwithstanding, you've made no real argument that libraries do not provide the public goods of communal learning, discourse, shared meeting spaces, free internet access (in intervals). I'm sure you'll go read your Wikipedia definition and come back to split hairs, but it really comes down to the notion of shared services and their potential for enriching the lives of the people in a given community. You've exhibited a great disdain for such here. It's distasteful, but I'm accustomed to it here on the internet, where every engineer who read a Rand novel got the idea that he was John Galt. So it goes.
Second, you've brought in this cable TV nonsense, as if it reveals that the poor are in fact not poor at all because they've found a way to scrape together enough money to enjoy just one small pleasure. Would you like to commission a study on how many poor children eat one or more pieces of candy during a given month? Would that vindicate your view that nobody is poor and that nobody benefits from shared services and that people with less money and opportunity than you are all lazy idiots looking for a way to mooch off of your bootstrapped successes? I think not. I think you'd still be dissatisfied after having ripped off the mask of those greedy little children in the bad neighborhoods, pretending to be poor while eating a piece of candy now and then. For shame! It's almost as bad as having a Playstation! You went looking for these data points as if they prove something. You went looking for data with a clear agenda. You didn't point out how few of these households have usable kitchen appliances or access to healthy, affordable foods. You didn't check out their schools. No, you went looking for evidence that nobody's really poor. I wish you were right.
Third, instead of picking on public libraries, let's talk about the NSF grant that you say is funding your own lifestyle on your homepage at NYU. Is that a public good? I'm paying for scientific research. You're sucking just as hard on the government teat as anybody. Shouldn't you explain to us why it's worth it when our libraries aren't? The truth is, I'm a big believer in funding scientific research and public libraries. You seem to want it both ways here, though. You want to bash libraries as useless and go on and on with these badly built, parsing arguments. Why don't you feel the same way about NSF grants? Are those a public good? I'd say by your criteria, they are not, since a grant for you means no grant for somebody else. I suspect that your logic only really applies to those less motivated, less gifted souls who haunt the dim and sad hallways of our dying public libraries. Is that it?
Fourth, your attitudes here, I'm sure, seem logical to you and your friends on the internet who love John Galt as much as you do. But these economic and social issues are about outcomes in systems which are (effectively) infinitely complex. And they carry moral weight. Your approach to these questions, in their selfishness and proud disregard for your fellow man and neighbor, is, as Gore Vidal described Ayn Rand's philosophy, "almost perfect in its immorality." An easier way of saying that is that you just sound like a dick. Sure, you're pompous and kind of a smartass, but that's most of us here in computerland. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how painfully careless you are with the hopes, the well-being, or simply the lives of others. You reduce our collective existence to atomic miseries, as if you've escaped most of them by your own virtue rather than through a series of accidents. You place blame where it isn't due and heap glory where it doesn't belong.
You can call it libertarianism. I just call it being an asshole.
See you at the library (not now - I'm headed to the bar).
Mind me asking where in South Texas? Austin here. I have quite a few technical books lying around and plenty of colleagues who likely do as well.