The problem with a $200 book is that it's hard to tell the difference between a book that contains $100k of knowledge and a book that contains $100 of knowledge.
Even if you found zero recipes, that does not mean you wasted time. Maybe if you think in terms of results for that particular cookbook investment, but it is pretty arbitrary way to look at it. What if you tried to measure your return for investment on a single page of a cookbook? For half a dozen coobkooks? For a shelf of cookbooks?
If you continue buying and studying cookbooks, you will find some good recipes in some cookbooks and what you need to look for is the total return on the total of investment. I spent a ton of money on cookbooks but my life is much better for it and I have zero regrets even if many of these cookbooks yielded zero results.
So now back to technical books.
Some of these books will yield new knowledge and some may yield very little or even none at all. You may not know before you buy a book whether it will pay for itself, but you know if the whole business of buying books and learning from them is worth it. I chose to buy and read books even if some of them yield little results because I think I am a better person and a better developer for it. I learned a lot of useful stuff even if I completely ignore majority of everything I read and then forget majority of everything I thought valuable.
Hiring people who do not perform seems like a profound waste of resources. Doing projects that fail seems like a profound waste of resources. Learning technology that will not be helpful later in your life seems like a profound waste of resources.
When was the last time you found a cookbook where a significant portion of recipes stayed with you for the rest of your life?
It’s like being able to walk into a bookstore full of cookbooks, and by skimming a few pages here and there, walk out with 3 fantastic cookbooks.
In other words, good programmers have the ability to quickly understand the full problem space (including business concerns) and efficiently navigate the solution space.
But if anyone is like me and interested in taking a risk on those $80-150 tomes, CRC Press' books have been more hits than misses for me.
But if you are are into graphics programming:
-Peter Shirley's Fundamentals of Computer Graphics is a great comprehensive resource. Despite the name, it serves as a great jumping off point even for experts into a different subdomain if they don't know where to start
- Johnathan Cooper's Game Anim is one of my most recent purachases. A great overview of the animation process, from the views of both the artist and technical engineer. Not just great for concepts but to get an idea of how and where a large studio executes their workkflow in production.
- Most of the GPU series from Wolfgang Engel are worth their weight in gold. The 7 or so GPU Pro series is basically whitepapers on all sorts of (at the time) cutting edge rendering techniques. Then the "GPU Pro 360" books are there if you wanted to focus on a specific subdomain instead of looking across the pro books (e.g. a GPU Pro 360 book focusing on Lighting or Image processing)
But IMO that's a stupid way to view books in general. You would have to contend that ALL books are worth nothing, because you have to expend effort to read it or try to actually make use of the knowledge in it.
So how I define value of a book? From the economics, this would be the opportunity cost which is the next best thing you could do. If you have better use of your time than reading any book then yes, books are worthless to you as long as you can do better things with your time.
For me, I found that reading books brings immense value to me by either directly bringing actionable knowledge or by causing me to think in new ways. Yes, these are my thoughts, but I argue I would not have them if I kept my brain just doing the same thing every day.
I attribute many hundreds of thousands of dollars of my income to ideas in books that I red and some of these books more than others. I am not listing these books here because I also believe that it is not about these books. It is about me getting value from the ideas that I would not know otherwise.