I like to hang out in Barnes and Noble every so often and take a gander at various design books and magazines.  In my opinion you can’t go wrong with a good design book. Why?  Because a good design book can give you inspiration when your creative well runs dry, keep you up to date on the latest trends and most importantly good design never wears out its welcome.

Every now and then  I will sometime make my way to the various coding books (for websites). I often think to myself  if it’s worth picking up a book or two to keep myself updated on AJAX or PHP.  In all honesty, I don’t like to get to involved with coding (back end coding). I do my XHTML, CSS and manipulate my jQuery, other than that I stay away from it.  Looking at lines of text and random characters is not my idea of fun times and not why I went to art school.

The question still remains. Is it worth the purchase of a book that focuses on some aspect of coding; php, javascript, jquery and so on?  In my eyes, the realm of coding changes so rapidly, that by the time I buy the latest jQuery book a newer version is already out.  Unlike design wants certain coding language goes out of style it very rarely makes a comeback.  Besides why spend money learning code, when there are various websites that are more than happy to provide you with various tutorials for free.  I guess it could be a good purchase if only to get the basics down, but I still question the worth.