Most books are wordy. But then again so are most articles, podcasts, and videos. Good books, however, are some of my favorite things: The Language Instinct by

Most books are wordy. But then again so are most articles, podcasts, and videos. Good books, however, are some of my favorite things: The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker, Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, On Writing Well by William Zinsser. One advantage of a book by someone who is both (a) an expert in the field, and (b) an expert at expression, is a coherent, thorough treatment of a subject, from start to finish. It's usually best to first get your hands dirty for a few weeks and then search for the best book on the subject (rather than the other way around). For example, I fiddled with JavaScript, writing little snippets, got them to kind of work. But I could not say at that time that I understood JavaScript. And had I tried to learn JavaScript by reading scraps here and there online I wonder if I would have ever developed a coherent understanding. What I did was buy the O'Reilly book, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, by Brendan Eich, which is 500 pages, and I read it cover to cover. I was then ready to write my own framework :)