One of my friends, Kenny, always teases me that no matter where I go my desk always looks the same; in other words, it is always laid out the same way. And he’s right, but there’s a good reason for that: it works for me.
One of the parts of that system-that-works-for-me is a small collection of reference books that I always have to hand. At home they are on a shelf next to me, at work they are on my enormous desk.
At the moment these are my reference books of choice:
- TerminalFour SiteManager userguides (TerminalFour)
- Web design style guide (Me!)
- Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Meyer (O’Reilly)
- HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, Musciano & Kennedy (O’Reilly)
- JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Flannagan (O’Reilly)
- PPK on JavaScript, Koch (New Riders)
- Pro JavaScript Techniques, Resig (Apress)
- Practical Thinking, Edward de Bono (University library book)
- Celebrating Common Prayer, Society of St Francis
- CSS Pocket Reference, Meyer (O’Reilly)
- HTML & XHTML Pocket Reference, Niederst Robbins (O’Reilly)
- JavaScript Pocket Reference, Flanagan (O’Reilly)
- PHP Pocket Reference, Lerdorf (O’Reilly)
- SQL Pocket Guide, Gennick (O’Reilly)
At the moment the least used of these are the SQL and PHP Pocket Reference guides, and the most used are the Definitive Guides for XHTML and CSS, and since I’m debugging code for a website launch Celebrating Common Prayer is also getting a look in once or twice!
My close-at-hand collection of books at home is completely different:
Mostly Scottish Episcopal Church books — Code of Canons, liturgy, and the Red Book (contacts) — a bible (NRSV) and Revised Common Lectionary, an English dictionary and thesaurus, a copy of Getting Things Done and two copies of the Visual Quickstart Guide for WordPress 2.
So now you know! What are your close-at-hand books of choice?