Don’t know which book to choose? There are so many books on the market with attractive names. Sometimes friends recommend it, but I see another book with good reviews on the Internet, and I am confused, which one should I buy?

I used to be so entangled.

I learned EXCEL five years ago. I spent several days researching which book to buy. Finally, I chose a book that seemed good. When I bought it, I found it was a book similar to the EXCEL manual, which introduced various menus. function, but it doesn’t tell you what problems it can solve, and there are no practical cases. I thought that since I had already bought it, I might as well bite the bullet and read on. After reading it, I learned nothing and my time was wasted. But I was unwilling to give in and wanted to buy a book that could really solve my problem. This time I simply bought three books at once. There is always one that can satisfy me. Sure enough, one of them has a writing idea that suits me very well. .

Now that I think about it, if you are not sure which one is better, why not buy all the books you are struggling with? Buying three copies only costs over a hundred yuan, and five copies only costs two hundred. If you only buy one book at a time, your learning effect will be hung on this tree, or you will have to find another book in the end. Have you considered the time cost and trial and error cost?

Stephen once wrote an article, "If you can do it with money, do it with money, why not do it." It mentioned in it that if you can do it with money, spend as much as possible.

Instead of trying one book at a time, it is better to buy five books at a time. If you find four of them are garbage after you buy them, there is still one you can read. An added benefit is that the different books complement each other. The problem I often encounter when learning new knowledge or skills is that if I only read one book, I really can’t understand some parts and there is no explanation in the book, but if I read another book, I will find the explanation. This is in line with the principle of optimal efficiency.

To give a few examples:

A certain product had quality problems and urgently needed a new glue to solve them. Searching on Alibaba, you can find more than a dozen models, and they spent a lot of money I spent a few days studying product information and researching which one is the best, just like buying clothes on Taobao. I told them, is the best one you have researched on paper really the best? What if it doesn’t work when you buy it back? Are you going to change to another one and wait three days for the courier to arrive before testing again? If that doesn't work, how about waiting another three days? Why not buy it all at once and give it a try? Does the company still lack such a little money? This small amount of money is nothing compared to the air freight you will have to pay for delaying the order.

Last year, I wanted to understand what Industry 4.0 and big data were, so I bought three books at once. One of them was "Big Data Era" and the other two were written by Chinese people. It's a little more difficult for foreigners to write, and it's easier for Chinese people to understand, but the depth may not be that high. If you read these books mixed with each other, you will have a thorough understanding.

I learned Excel VBA last year and bought three books. Two of them were rubbish. The other one was well written and helped me get started and enable me to write programs independently.

I wanted to learn PPT this year, but my brain was short-circuited and I just bought a book called "XXXX Notes" (by a certain big V on Zhihu, I won't name them). After reading it, I found that it was really rubbish and I didn't learn anything. Pure waste of time. Finally, I signed up for two NetEase Cloud courses and one WeChat course. One of them was from a certain Ye, and the effect was pretty good. The other one was from XXX Design Emergency Room, which was only average, and a waste of my time. The other one was from a Zhihu expert. , haven’t had time to see it yet.

I plan to learn python, and I also plan to buy four or five books that are highly rated on Amazon and recommended on Zhihu.

ps:

The above evaluations of various books are all subjective. It does not mean that they are really rubbish, but maybe they are just not suitable for me personally.

The above-mentioned buying a few more books means that it is within one’s financial ability.