3MF

Heavy reading

Perhaps one of the most beneficial things i walked away from my recent lunch with Jack, was a renewed enthusiasm for reading tech books. When i first started programming web stuff, i read them all the time. I bought a lot of books that gave me a good foundation for what i was getting into and i still use many of them as references today. After a while i began to buy fewer because i found out that i knew all i needed to fulfill the development requests i was being presented with and those books were getting darn expensive at around fifty bucks a pop.

I realized that the lack of new ideas may be the reason i was feeling my programming was getting a bit stale. First, i had my manager order up some books so we could expense them as training materials. That's how Code Complete arrived on my desk. Jack recommended it and they just released an updated version. I'm about two thirds through that one. Next, while surfing around for some code to help out a project i was working on, i came across a perl script that did just what i wanted. I thought i would try to port some of its ideas to VBScript but to do that i had to understand what it was doing. A co-worker happened to have the "camel book" in his collection so i've been reading through that as well. Maybe someday i can find an excuse to write a perl script of my one. I'm also about sixty percent through that one. Just yesterday i picked up PHP and MySQL Development to get me started on the Civic site redesign. While there are many good guides online, i always like something to flip though in front of me. (I hope the newly released PHP 5.0 isn't too much different.) Next i have two VB.NET books that i got a while ago but now have the desire to tackle more aggressively. Finally i have my script which can't get lost in the shuffle.

All together, that totals about 3800 pages of stuff that i want to get into my brain. I wish there were more hours on the day.

Posted by Matthew at July 14, 2004 06:07 PM