Alexander on Web Development

[inline:iStock_000010050675XSmall.jpg=Buying Time]

When I go to borders to buy books, I tend to take 3 to 8 books at a time. I first read the back page, and if it interests me, then I read the index to see if it has anything that interests me. I prefer to buy those whose teach me something I didn't know in every chapter. However, more often than not, I find myself buying a book because it has one or two chapters of something that really interests me. Which may leave you wondering: how can you spend $70.00 dollars for just a couple of useful chapters when you can get that same knowledge from the Internet - specially for the web development/design field? Technical documentation is written by developers, technical books are written by developers, edited by technical editors, then reviewed by regular editors.

In the field that I work often the difference between a successful project and a failed one is learning previously unknown technologies literally from one day to the other, then applying what you just learned right there on the spot. Time being one of the most valuable resources yet most limited constraint on web development projects, learning fast is key - and I'll do whatever I need to learn faster.

Books should allow us to learn faster because while they are written by the author, they are edited by someone who is conscious of our time constraints (the editor) - and whose job is solely to make sure that they are well structured and easier to parse. On top of that, books that are sold by specialized technical publishing companies like Apress and New Riders tend to feature not only the regular senior/junior editors, but they also feature one or more technical editors - whose job is to make sure that the technical examples (like snippets of PHP or JavaScript code) provided are technically accurate and work in the real world - a critical task indeed. Apart from resting my sore eyes from seeing two giant, brilliant monitors all day long, small differences like these in books allow me to learn faster. Although you cannot buy time because time itself is priceless, when buying a book I feel like I'm buying time at a price infinitely cheaper than the price of time.