looking at reference material

[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.

[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

[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

[minestrone]

It is probably like asking a writer to get by without using a dictionary.

If you add up all the functions from the the libraries, frameworks and languages I use then it probably equals the amount of words in the English language.

[OwlHoot]

Of course you should use books/web. Am I expected to memorise entire Java, .NET and Flex APIs?

WHS

I do a quick Google to look up obscure, and even not so obscure, function parameters, even if I'm 95% sure I remember them. Getting it right first time saves a lot of time. So it's well worth it.

It partly depends on what you're working with. Some systems like Visual Studio are more helpful with routine stuff like parameters and methods. But perldoc isn't always so helpful.

It's about getting the job done, not showing off your trainspotter memory for a myriad details.

[BrowneIssue]

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.

[d000hg]

Of course you should use books/web. Am I expected to memorise entire Java, .NET and Flex APIs?

[gingerjedi]

The poll has conflicting options, I don't think it looks bad if it's work related but it does if it's not.

Of course it's ok to look things up although you'd do well to avoid anything entitled '***** for Dummies' if you want to last beyond the first week.

[BrilloPad]

I prefer to ask a question in technical than look it up .....

[zara_backdog]

No, I'm an analyst - it is what I do

[Board Game Geek]

Yes.

[cojak]

Not at all - people have commented/laughed in the past, but if they read the stuff themselves they wouldn't need to employ me in the first place.

[threaded mode] It also helps if you have personally been acknowledged by the authors within said books, of course [/threaded mode]

And it's interesting that I always need a locked drawer for my books since many people think that anyone can use them...

[mrdonuts]

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