Reading many books is hard. There are so many great books to choose from, and there's too little time to read them all. And with so much literature available, you run the risk of not reading the stuff that is most relevant to your current situation.

So here's what I do.

Though I love reading blogs and wikis, I prefer to read books when I need some serious learning. It's because information on the web is usually fragmented, and doesn't tell you a complete story about a topic from start to finish. The high level of programming experience required on blogs like Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen almost makes me nauseous ("Using Boo for Scripting Banshee", WTF is that?), and wikis, SDK's and on-line tutorials never seem to be written with a human reader in mind ("Now let's switch from dynamic typing to transactional web services, with a bit of cryptography in between, and you can figure out for yourself how those topics are related...").

With books I am able to learn about a topic from the barest basics ("In the beginning there was the Start button...") to the most