looking at reference material

[NickFitz]

do you think it looks bad if you lookup books/manuals/websites whilst on site ?

I've found that being able to say that there's a solution to, or information appertaining to, some problem, and either find it online in seconds, state which book it's contained in, or walk over to the bookshelf (in those ClientCorps that have one) and turn to the relevant page of the manual and point at the relevant information is invaluable in reinforcing clients' appreciation of my expertise.

It doesn't matter if you know the answer. Knowing how to find the answer is what counts.

If a client thought I was somehow failing by looking something up rather than relying on a possibly faulty memory, I would assume that the client was itself failing by expecting the impossible. As others have suggested in this thread, nobody in their right mind would expect somebody to memorise every single method signature in the Java, .NET or PHP APIs.

FWIW, when I was in my technical interview at Y! I responded to a question by saying that I didn't know, but if I needed to I'd just look it up. One of the two interviewers turned to the other, saying "That's true - we should get rid of that question. Nobody remembers stuff like that, you just Google it."

After a momentary pause he corrected himself: "Well, you just search on Y!"... and then all three of us burst out laughing

[NickFitz]

I...turn to the relevant page of the manual ...

Actually it's usually an O'Reilly book rather than a manual.

Invoking a link to the relevant part of a W3C spec is always FTW too

[cojak]

I tend to be discrete. I have found that if I refer to my PRINCE2 manual and someone sees me, there are three consequences:

a) the tosser will make a sarcastic comment: "I thought you were qualified?";
b) it will go missing within one day and appear on or even in that same tosser's desk;
c) that tosser will pester me until the end of the contract with "give us a lend of your manual".

I now keep a .PDF of the manual on my desktop rather than the paper on in my desk. My other reference material I keep at home to stop it being pinched.

That's why I use a locked drawer - or only have the book I want for that day/week, then take it home.