I use all of these books on a regular basis for maintaining and
improving my web site, running my home system and the Predictions League, and inevitably at
work. They're all excellent reference sources rather than 'How busy
dummies do X in 21 days for idiots' books, so don't buy them if that's
what you're after - but if you want an excellent reference book, these
are what you're looking for.
 |
Programming Perl by Larry Wall, Tom Christansen and
Randall L. Schwartz. The standard reference guide for all Perl programmers,
from first principles to more advanced topics. |
| The Perl Cookbook by Tom Christiansen and
Nathan Torkington. Hundreds of examples, problems, solutions and tips that
continue and extend the foundations in the Camel book. |
 |
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Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl.
Everything you could possibly need to know about regular expressions and
the subtle differences and additional features that are available in Perl,
awk and 'standard' (i.e. ed/sed) UNIX regular expressions. |
| sed and awk by Dale Dougherty and Arnold Robbins.
An extremely useful and comprehensive guide to the basics and the more
advanced use of these UNIX filters, covering all of the standard variants. |
 |
 |
HTML and XHTML - The Definitive Guide by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy
This is what taught me HTML (the first edition 5? years ago covered Netscape
2 extensions :-) and has been well updated over time. Great reference,
though I was a little bit sick of Kumquats by the end of it. |
| Dynamic HTML - The Definitive Reference by Danny Goodman.
I've not done a huge amount of DHTML - lack of widespread browser support
for most of the really useful features being a key reason, but this gives
excellent coverage, and is worth the price for the fact that you get a
detailed reference of CSS/HTML/DHTML/DOM in the same book: invaluable for
cross-referencing. |
 |
 |
JavaScript - The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan.
Excellent coverage of the language, how to support multiple versions and
types of browsers and how to hide all that sort of crud without ending up
with a lowest common denominator solution. |
| UNIX Systems Programming for SVR4 by David A. Curry.
An excellent general reference to SVR4 programming, with mentions for all of
the major variants. Not quite as comprehensive as Stevens, but slightly easier
to carry around. |
 |
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Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment by W. Richard Stevens.
A weighty tome, but worth the strain of lugging it around. If you're doing
any amount of semi-serious systems work, you can't afford to be without this. |
| TCP/IP Illustrated Vol 1: The Protocols
by W. Richard Stevens. Doing serious network programming? Don't have this book?
Get another job, cos you don't know what you're doing. |
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