How practical is an iPad for “reading” programming books?

Question

Disclaimer: It's kinda hard to search for this question, as Google would give me mostly iOS programming topics.

I'm planning on buying an iPad2 and I wonder if other programmers have found it to be a practical, and hopefully, better replacement for books.

Despite the availability of online tutorials I have found the times I have learned best and made the most progress is when I forced myself to sit down and read through manuals, from start to finish.

I guess the crux of my question is: as a developer, have you been able to use an iPad for reading programming books in a way that it is more convenient than Cmd/Alt-Tabbing between a PDF viewer and other apps on your computer?

Also, does the iPad PDF viewer remember the last viewed page of every PDF file? (Like Skim does on Mac OS)

Thanks!

Answer 1

I use GoodReader for reading Apple manuals, synced via Dropbox. GR remembers positions in all PDFs I read. It also keeps all my annotations and highlights in sync with PDFs on my Mac. Overall, very convenient solution IMHO.

Answer 2

I use iBooks on the iPad to read all my development books, and if your doing iOS development you'll even find the Apple development books in eBook format. It's the main purpose I bought my iPad, and it definitely works for that purpose. Since iBooks can import PDF's even my older books I have scanned works.

Answer 3

Ipad is more convenient than a kindle , ESP for reading programming ebooks..... And , the good part is that while looking at your pc, with ipad, you can compile the code easily.... I bought a kindle, I do not like it very much..... But , for iPad, I love it. :)