Reference Book Suggestions

[sbonner]

I had a few nice thick reference books that I used to keep when I lived with my parents, but they got "lost" in the horrors that is the "the extra bedroom." Yeah. Those of you who live with hoarders know what I mean.

They were old anyway. Time for some new stuff!

I'm looking comprehensive, well-written, and easy to use reference books. NOT text-books - I can find tutorials for anything, but when I want to look up something, I don't want to be thumbing through Google.

Preferably, these books would have ebook editions or exist in torrent form; I'm short on cash and it'll be a while before I can get the physical thing (I'm old-fashioned).

Looking for resources on:

CSS
HTML/DHTML/XHTML
PHP
JavaScript

Also, I'm interested in looking into other technologies, so I would love to find stuff on...

C#
Silverlight
ActionScript
Development in Adobe Air

[misson]

It's hard to go wrong with O'Reilly, and you can't go wrong with the specs. You can download the HTML, CSS and DOM specs and PHP manual. The ECMAScript standard (ECMA-262) isn't very readable; the Javascript 1.5 reference and guide are old but still quite relevant (the features of newer JS versions that Firefox supports are listed on MDC's main JS page, though JS 1.5 contains the features that are supported by most browsers ). The C# ECMA spec is supposedly better than ECMA-262, probably on par with MS's spec. Flex Builder includes almost all the ActionScript and related documentation you'd care to have. If you don't want to keep Flex Builder, you can save the docs and dump the rest.

You can find more specific suggestions on StackOverflow for CSS, PHP, HTML and JS, though you'll probably find O'Reilly publishes something in the top 3 for each topic.