Books and Wikis

I favour books over other media. Books have a tangible quality and a permanence (up to issues of fire and flood).

The web is a fine thing. I could not get through a working day without a search engine and knowledgebase wikis. I often sprinkle Wikipedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/
references through my notes. But Wikipedia is more about what is believed to be true, than what is true, but, sometimes, that is actually what one is seeking. The key is realizing this.

I think my favorite reference works are technical tomes from just before the micro-electronics era - good solid volumes about gears and fasteners and levers. They are books with lots of tables and diagrams. The micro-electronics era made it easier to skim over the details and leave solutions to software. Do not misunderstand me, this hiding of complexity is a fine approach to real world problems, but it makes for unsatisfying reading in pursuit of knowledge.

I always used to enjoy leafing through the multi-volume McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. I guess they have a sort of reflection of it in
http://www.mhest.com/
But the paper copies had lots of interesting 1960's diagrams and explanations of how complex things work.