How many books do you have to read when you're a programmer?

Thompson Lee · 2011-08-04T13:23:32

I'm curious to know how many books do programmers read in their career lifetime. I have heard people reading over 20 books since high school. There are some people that read books, but didn't actually finish reading it completely (Chapter 1 through the Appendices), does that count as "You've read a book"? And when you read, do you read the same parts over and over again once per books you have in your possession? Does that make some parts of the contents redundant? This affects me setting a goal during my free time, to read about 15 programming books on C/C++, DirectX and OpenGL, and 2 big books on Java. And I would like for some opinions. Hopefully, it's not about what kind of books I have to read, just need the total amount. Thanks in advance.