Why on Earth would you limit yourself to the old way of doing things? You're not recreating a war; you're trying to get stuff done.

That is a mighty limited concept of 'reference' you have. Reference books are books you refer to when you want to know how to do something. Build a deck, grow orchids, how to do xyz in java.

But don't you jump to the right class javadocs via a well-tuned Google search?

(I've probably queried some variant of [java Pattern 5] hundreds of times to look up Java regex syntax. It's odd to see that the Sun Javadocs have now dropped from the rankings for this query with the Oracle re-domaining, and now some Columbian University mirror is the top hit.)