What's on your book shelf?

I cleaned up the bookshelf in my office. Here's a look at what's left:

Honestly, most of the stuff still there isn't stuff I ever crack open anymore. The biggest chunk moved to the library was composed of ASP.old stuff. I don't know why I still keep the Perl or DHTML books around. I guess it's to show people I was around back then or something.

It's weird that once you get to a certain level with a particular platform or product, you tend to stick to that product's SDK documentation. I used to really hate Microsoft documentation, but I guess now that I “get it” and have been using it for man years, it's totally adequate.

I do find myself going back to some of the books as examples of how not to present certain material while writing my own book. It took me awhile to understand certain concepts not because they were difficult, but because the material that was supposed to teach me took a poor approach.

I think that's what's hampering my progress. I'm laboring over a couple of chapters because I want them to be totally idiot proof, and I fear they'll never be good enough. Let's face it, if the book sucks, I may not ever write another one!

The one book I've barely cracked the cover on is Chris Sells' Windows Forms book. I'm bidding on a project that would require me to get a little more intimate with that topic, and I think from what I've read so far he does an outstanding job at explaining how to position and scale forms.