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Comment by tcbasche | Hacker News Reader

I bought a metric shiteload of books. Basically just climbed down the Amazon suggestions rabbit hole and got a heap of technical books that matched what I wanted to learn.

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I like physical books, and I want to buy more. But for $1k you can also get access to O'Reilly's [0] library ($499/year) which has a ton of excellent books on a variety of topics (not just programming). It's not as good as 10 years ago when they offered download tokens (I have so many PDFs from those days), but it's still a good system. And you can sometimes get discounts (ACM or IEEE used to get you access for half the cost, so total of ACM/IEEE + O'Reilly was basically the same as just O'Reilly, not sure the current discounts I get it through my employer). Then that $500 remaining can be directed towards higher quality books (especially ones you want on your reference shelf) or other materials.

[0] http://learning.oreilly.com

It's worth mentioning that via ACM you only have access to books + videos.

Quote from ACM's email:

``` Effective Monday, June 15, 2020, O'Reilly Media will no longer offer the following learning formats through ACM's O'Reilly Learning Collection:

    Live Online Training
    Katacoda Scenarios
    Jupyter Notebooks
    Sandboxes
    Certifications

All books, recorded videos (including O'Reilly conference/Superstream events), and learning paths will remain accessible to ACM Members. If you are currently using content from any of the categories above, make sure to complete your training by Sunday, June 14. -ACM Learning Center ```

Good to know. I've never looked at their certifications, and the scenarios I've looked at suffer a bit from:

  How to draw an owl:
  1. Draw a circle
  2. Print this picture of an owl

No real steps that you're presented to work through like a good tutorial should do. Too much material in the last step that boils down to "copy these 50 lines of code and you're done!".

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