Agreed. Books are also the result of much more time and effort spent thinking about, planning, and evolving the content, structure, presentation. A book-length collection of blog posts just won't have the attention to detail and completeness that most books do.
I also believe books improve one's ability to concentrate, which directly benefits a programmer's ability to get into and stay in flow. Whereas blog posts are, to paraphrase Fight Club, 'single serving' bits of information, reading a book requires (and improves) mental commitment and the ability to shut out distractions and delay gratification for longer durations.
I got myself a Kindle for Christmas, and one of the biggest benefits of this little device is that it eliminates distractions like email and makes it much easier to shut out the world and concentrate on reading long, relatively difficult technical papers and books (vs reading them on my computer as I had been doing previously). Amazon really knows what they're doing when it comes to books and reading.
However, you have to careful about reading books on technology. It is very possible that the technology has changed since the book was published. There are some technologies I would read books for and some technologies that I would read the online documentation and blogs.
I disagree. All books are released too early if you think about it. The technology will change rapidly no matter when you buy the book so it's up to the buyer to make sure it's the latest release for the version they'll be working with if a version applies.
Let's take nodejs for example. I think it's safe to say that it's new enough to be considered too early to publish if there were such a thing. Even if node changes drastically within the next few months any book about any technology that's worth anything at all (did I say anything enough times? Haha) will teach you the fundamentals about how to get it, set it up, configure it how you want, and get you going with some reproduce able examples. That's really all you need. No book can be expectd to cover every last bit of the technology in great detail. I'd argue that most people learning to program get the fundamentals from the books and maybe some bonus knowledge and the rest we pick up with experience and research.
Then you have remember that there's a good bit of time between the writing of the book and it's publishing and then some more time between editions. No book can be current. But it doesn't matter because of why we buy the books to begin with. We learn the ropes from them. Even books about advanced techniques teach you enough about a technology so that in a case where the advanced technique is out of date you can still get what you want done by inferring how you're supposed to do things now based on other data from the book combined with experience and practice. So given all this, I don't think there's a such thing as being released too early and in fact believe all books are released too late. But they're valuable nonetheless.
Servicable, sometimes only given that I have 20/20 vision (PDFs with particularly small text), but plenty of room for improvement.
The biggest problem is that Kindle can't reflow PDF text the way it does with mobi formats (which I believe is true anywhere you read PDF, not just kindle), so you can't seamlessly resize the text. You can zoom the PDF document to enlarge the text, but page turning functionality doesn't work until you zoom back out since a zoomed document will reinterpret page turn actions as horizontal scrolling actions (on Kindle Touch at least, not sure about the others with specific hardware buttons for page turning).
There is a literal ton of info on converting PDF to mobi at the Kindle subreddit, but no perfect conversion techniques yet:
1. Use Briss (http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/) to trim the margins of the pdf, then read it in Landscape mode. This naturally enlarges the text without breaking page turning.
2. Use any of the converters listed in the Reddit/r/kindle sidebar, whether downloadable software or web-based (Readability, Instapaper, SendToReader, etc).
3. Use Calibre to convert PDF to mobi (results are mixed, and graphs and images aren't handled so well).
4. Email your PDF to your_kindle_id@free.kindle.com with "convert" in the subject to have the PDF converted to mobi by Amazon and then delivered to your kindle. Similar results as 4.
All of them except #1 result in mangled formatting to some degree or other, especially PDFs (or PDFs created from websites) with special math or code formatting. Like I said, servicable, you can read it and get the info, but not the brilliant reading experience it is with native .mobi files.
Thanks. Makes me wonder if there's a startup in there somewhere, for converting pdf to mobi or even a device optimized for reading pdfs.
I respect pdfs for their Postscript origins but man do I hate getting a pdf link, hate waiting for them to load, hate reading them on my computer. And yet much of what I want to read is locked inside them.
That thought occurred to me too. There are a bunch already working on it and are all listed in the sidebar of the kindle subreddit. But I imagine whoever perfects it is looking at a quick buyout from one of them, or maybe even Amazon. It's definitely a real pain point for an otherwise brilliant product.
I can't speak for him but on the smallest (7''?) Kindle reading abstracts is a bit of a pain, reading single column per page is fine but double column is annoying enough I'm considering getting reading glasses or a magnifying glass. (I'm 27) I meant to email amazon to find out if you can dismiss the progress bar because with some pdfs it obscures the bottom line which is annoying as all hell. Still highly recommended.
Edit: 10'' would almost certainly be fine. The zoom doesn't really fix the problems with double column pdfs either.
I also believe books improve one's ability to concentrate, which directly benefits a programmer's ability to get into and stay in flow. Whereas blog posts are, to paraphrase Fight Club, 'single serving' bits of information, reading a book requires (and improves) mental commitment and the ability to shut out distractions and delay gratification for longer durations.
I got myself a Kindle for Christmas, and one of the biggest benefits of this little device is that it eliminates distractions like email and makes it much easier to shut out the world and concentrate on reading long, relatively difficult technical papers and books (vs reading them on my computer as I had been doing previously). Amazon really knows what they're doing when it comes to books and reading.