Which series of programming books is the best?

Which series of programming books is the best?
O'reilly? Professional? Apress? For dummies?

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And I guess another question would be, which is the best for your money?

O'reilly is good, although my only experience with it is this gigantic copy of Programming Perl. It's thorough, and I've found it to be a great learning resource. It's also fucking huge.
Aside from that a lot of the things by No Starch Press are worth looking at. I'm reading through Learn You Some Erlang right now, and it looks good so far.

Best for your money would be to wait for some guys to dump PDFs, or to find a link to the Gentoomen library.

don't forget that the think "[insert programming language here]" books are free

Irrelevant, just buy the best book for each language.

That thing needs to be updated, i dont think theres a single book newer than 2009 in there.

TAOCP.

Has anyone here even read this? Is there any knowledge is these that I can't get anywhere else?

I've read the bit hacks fasicule, and it's incredibly good. It's to learn programming, though, not to learn a language. A muscled version of SICP (but with a low level imaginary language).

Imaginary language?

(different user)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programming#Assembly_language_in_the_book

If you want to get shit done, wrox is the best.

I'm one of those faggots who pirate books but I actually read of them, and I study them when I see they are worth my time.
Wrox books are the ones who gave me the more interesting skills and the best insights.

Now, I'm not sure all their books are good, but the ones I've read were all great. This has going on since I started in 2008 and I hope they keep up with the quality.

You mean like bang for the buck? If so, then your question doesn't really make sense for me - if you are going to read a technical book, it's cost is always negligible compared to the time you are going to invest into studying it. Even if you're flipping burgers for a living. It's totally not worth saving say 10$ just to struggle with some idiot author for a next couple of weeks. And if you're going to read just fragments of it because you need if for something in particular, then it doesn't deserve the space on your shelf - get yourself an e-book or borrow it from a library.
My rule is that I buy only books that I'm sure I'm going to read from cover to cover or that they're going to be an useful reference material for me in the future. In which case, it's no point in skimping on the price.

Wow, that's a dated approach. Nowadays, the point of studying algorithms isn't to write as fast code as possible, but to maintain a certain level of decency in your everyday monkey code.

Well the guy is around 80 years old.

Honestly, I thought he was dead.
I've read parts of TAoCP back in the college days, but I thought they would had this updated in some newer edition.

Well considering that he's not even done the 4th volume and he wants to do 3 more he probably will be dead before its done.

How is it dated? Complexity theory considers the number of operations for the complexity. His approach is exactly the same (possibly with different costs for each instruction), is it not?

You don't count EVERY operation when estimating the complexity, only the significant ones. That's the beauty of it - it allows you to estimate the order of time in which something will compute without dabbling with low level details. I'll turn your question around - if his approach is the same, why should we bother with unnecessary minutiae?

Would you recommend any specific volume or the whole thing?

But it's not only about algorithms. The "Bit hacking" bits I was talking about are obviously easier done with assembly. Assembly is used here mainly because it's the lowest common denominator.