With the unfortunate brushfires that have occurred in Victoria, Australia, the big Aussie-based web development website SitePoint (see blogroll here for direct link) is raising funds for victims of the disaster by selling five of their books for $29.95 USD and donating ALL of the proceeds. If you’re any kind of web developer and you have any kind of heart and human compassion in you it’s hard to not help out with this effort. I have just placed my own order for five of these books.

The main reason I’m mentioning this here is in the hopes that other people that could use web dev books might also want to take advantage of this offer and increase the amount of help that is offered to those who were affected by these historically bad wildfires.

This made me think that even in this Internet age I actually do purchase AND read web development books. Of course I’m looking at a darn computer screen much of the day but I don’t like to read big blocks of text off of a computer monitor and sometimes I learn things from books that I wouldn’t learn from online tutorials

And here are many of the web development books I own myself:

And, yes, I actually read them and learn from them and utilize their principles. The one I’m reading the most at the moment is Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 by John Allsopp.