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If my behaviour is any guide: don't allow near your source code anyone who's just finished reading Design Patterns. That book was a revelation to me, but for a while after I read it I had an irrational and actively harmful to "do patterns" in everything I was coding.

Over on the French XP Dominic replies to one of our colleagues who's looking for "practical" books on managing a team, suggesting that he should leave off his reading until after he's actually had the experience of managing the team.

I have that pattern. After a particularly rich work experience, or a personal one for that matter, a book or an article which provides relevant explanations or conceptual frameworks can be a fantastic source of insights, and help integrate the knowledge gained from our experiences.

I also have the opposite (but complementary) pattern. I read an interesting book, and three weeks or six months later I find that it has "prepared" me for a situation I'm going through, without my having planned it, without the learning having been a conscious effort. I learn a lot by percolation.

I also remember one occasion where a book, which I'd bought and read for that specific purpose, was hugely useful and contributed to making the gig a success. (That book was Peter Block's Flawless Consulting.) That book has the sort of "how-to" orientation which had proved so dangerous in the case of Design Patterns, but it seems I was mature enough to apply Block's recipes intelligently, this time around; I think I knew already most of them, and what helped most was the step-by-step, "putting it all together" synthesis he presents.

Given all this, my strategy is to read all the time, about every topic that I think I could possibly be interested in - most of my reading eventually turns out to be useful in one way or another. :)