- I don't buy books for technologies anymore, I buy books for algorithms. Most of my technology purchases are out of date. - Most online stuff is decent for th

- I don't buy books for technologies anymore, I buy books for algorithms. Most of my technology purchases are out of date. - Most online stuff is decent for the first 2-3 weeks. - Meat of the learning is done in the trenches with the manual of the system ready-to-hand (i.e., google). - choose a small and stupid project for using it in anger. I favor one of these: 1. Basic data structure (binary tree, linked list) 2. Interface with postgres. 3. Shell out to the OS and do some munging of the results. These represent a slice of common & standard tasks involving libraries, string handling, interfacing with other tools and data structures. Most of my work generally involves one of these 3.