A friend of my asked me to help her pick out some tech book at Barns & Nobles. I was somewhat disappointed at the selection of books that where on the shelves. Out of the hundreds of tech books only three or four I would consider worth owning and I already own like three of those. I guess that makes me somewhat biased. Lets consider the books that where good.

• The Pragmatic Programmer. This book is great because the authors talk about issues like code duplication, refactoring, testing. All the things that real programmers face every day.
• C Programming Language. Most people who buy tech books there probably don't even know C is a language. This is a weird one to have on shelves where "Learn Asp.net in 5 minutes now" books in the vicinity.
• JavaScript The Definitive Guide. I always love those O'Reilly books that are the definitive guides because they usually are.
• Apache Cookbook. Another O'Reilly book and probably the best tech books possible at to buy at Barns & Nobles.
• The Mythical Man-Month. Another classic that does not fit in with the rest of them. I read it way back in college. The premise is simple. Can't just throw people at a software development project and expect it to work. At least that was the revelation way back in the 70's at IBM. Fast forward thirty years and its still true. Software development still is too hard so you can't just chop it up into smaller chunks of work and had it out to people.

I guess if I needed to leard C# in 10 minutes I would get one of the other books. Although all the information is online anyway that a book is not necessary but nice. Generally O'Reilly, Apress, and Wrox are tech books that are any good the rest is just crap.