For me the whole point of buying programming books is to save time and these days fewer and fewer printed books accomplish that. Before the web I used to drive

For me the whole point of buying programming books is to save time and these days fewer and fewer printed books accomplish that. Before the web I used to drive 50 miles every other weekend to buy books from Computer Literacy to add to my personal library when I didn't have a need for them because of the time saved having them at hand later. I don't do this anymore, in part because for my needs the web is often sufficient but also because Computer Literacy eventually went out of business and there's no comparable store anymore worth that trip. These days I'm thrilled whenever I do find a printed programming book likely to save me time compared to searching the web. The last such book I found was Kurt Jung and Aaron Brown's "Beginning Lua Programming". It's full of well-organized time-saving details and an excellent companion to Roberto Ierusalimschy's "Programming in Lua", a book at the same quality level as K&R's "The C Programming Language". Unless the price is an absolute bargin, I won't bother buying a printed book unless it's as good as those.