My one, true book, my bible, if you will, has been the Camel. Although the Cookbook is useful, I don't even own a copy of it. We have it on CD at the office, and I have yet to find something in it that I couldn't derive from Camel. Personally, I haven't lifted code from it, although many of the programs I see floating about the place appear to be cut-'n'-paste scripts, with little understanding as to how the individual snippets work.

What does choosing Camel mean? It means a desire to build innovatively, not imitatively.