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There are many, many books out there on computers; my local bookstore has racks and racks of books on the subject. But how does one collect a good library of books that will help him out, without breaking the bank. O'Reilly hits the spot with it's CD Bookshelf collection. The series offers readers five to six books on CD and one hardcopy book for much less than the cost of those same books in hardcopy. The newest collection in this series is The Web Programming CD Bookshelf. This collection covers most of what one needs to know to start programming on the web and is complete in coverage of topics, from HTML to PHP, web servers to JavaScript.

The hardcopy book in this collection is Webmaster in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition (webmaster). Webmaster is a complete reference for being a Webmaster. Each chapter in this book is a deferent area of web technology, ranging from HTML, broken down by tag, to Apache, with details of each of the major modules. I was glad to see this book as the hardcopy book in this collection; it is perfectly laid out for getting at the information you need without having to delve into text descriptions or examples.

I will be reviewing each of the books on CD over the next few weeks, but as a collection I have to say that O'Reilly made good choices. Since they decided to go the PHP route of web programming the three PHP books included will get the reader from novice hello-world, up to a database driven web application. The two Definitive References do live up to their name. The one thing that I thought was missing was Perl; the only perl is discussed in Webmaster in the CGI.pm chapter.

The price of the collection is steep at $129.95, but considering what you are getting I think the price is very reasonable. If you don't already have these books and are looking at getting into web programming as a profession or hobby, this is the one stop collection for you.