You know I was going to put some Amazon Web Services stuff in the list. This book from O’Reilly is a great primer on all of Amazon’s services, including their servers and storage on demand products. If you’ve been wanted to learn more about developing tools on this platform, this is a great introduction with lots of examples and code samples to get your cloud project started.

Here’s another O’Reilly book, but this one deals with building websites and web applications that can scale. You never know what demand your sites or apps will have in the future, so if you can build them to scale from the get-go, your life will be much easier later.

This is my favorite book by Douglas Coupland. It was first published in 1995 and tells the story of the lives of Microsoft workers, but it’s much more then that. Some of the tech stuff has gone out of date, but the people and their struggles haven’t. I should get back to Coupland, I’ve got about 4 books of his I haven’t yet got around to reading yet. I think I left off at Girlfriend in a Coma.

According to the jQuery website, jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript. I’ve been trying to learn more about this technology but haven’t had a chance to really dig into it. There are a ton of really interesting uses and this book covers the language and is full of great examples.

Finally, don’t forget your web nerd is going to need a snack to help fuel all the coding and Web 2.0 and social media and twittering and blogging. Might I recommend this amazing item for sale? You can thank me later.