The 800 page book that made me a web dev
Well over twenty years ago I decided I wanted to be a web developer. I've always learned best on my own an at my own speed, so I bought myself a copy of Welling & Thomas's book, PHP and MySQL Web Development (https://repository.unikom.ac.id/32751/1/php%20and%20mysql%20web%20dev.pdf). The book was just over 800 pages long, covering database design, security, e-commerce and so on. I read that thing cover to cover and returned to it many times in my first years starting out as a freelancer - it is probably the most useful book I've ever read in terms of what it unlocked for me "career" wise, though much of what I do in front of a screen is also a hobby for me.
Now, I'm looking for that experience again, I'd like a fat book on some new topic - could be web adjacent or something more obliquely related to programming. For context, I've just started running a Linux homelab and I'm finding gaps in my bash and sysadmin knowledge, I've also recently started dabbling with audio DSP in Rust - those might be good areas for suggestions - but I'm happy to hear any random recommendations!
Let this thread to be a space for both recommendations (preferably modern-ish editions) and publications that were pivotal for you in work and life.
One of the main reasons for posting is I'm seeing more and more content move online, but paging through digital books / websites and/or watching YouTube videos is just not the same as flipping through a good book for me. Not very modern, but still a learning tool, Unix Text Processing [0] taught me tons about unix commands and utilities. It provided a foundation for things to come. Even if it's heavily into troff (we had DWB on the work computer) the shell, awk, sed and other commands (Chapter 12) were invaluable. Perl came later! > Unix Text Processing (Hayden Books) > Unix Text Processing, by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly, was published by Hayden Books in 1987, back when O'Reilly & Associates wrote technical documentation for hire. Hayden later took the book out of print, but Dale and Tim retained the copyright and have decided to make it available through our web site under Creative Commons' Attribution License. > Unix Text Processing is available in the following ways: [0] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/ [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/utp/UnixTextProcessing.pdf (checked)
For what it's worth, I used grap, pic and troff to process lab data, create graphs and insert them into reports. On Sun-2 workstsations! A single PDF file via HTTP [1] and others ...