As a Ruby developer who spend a considerable amount of time with Rails, I’m a huge fan of the Pragmatic Programmer books and own a ridiculous number of them. While I have read several cover to cover, I find them most useful as reference guides when I need help on a specific topic.

Google is always a good place to look, but I find that technical books offer a better look at a topic when I need a good overview and want to see how the solution fits into the tool set as a whole.

Software craftsmanship encourages excellence and that means keeping all your tools in top shape. In that vein, I constantly tweak my PDF books with Adobe Acrobat after each download to make sure I spend as little time navigating the book as possible. The screencast below shows the quick process I go through.

Rev up your Pragmatic Programmer PDF books from Tim Harvey on Vimeo.