A Tech Blogger's Right of Passage
It seems that everyone who writes about programming topics in a blog format
eventually writes an article on what books they feel are important to read to
improve professionally. This shouldn't be surprising really. Generally
speaking if someone is going through the trouble of actually writing an
article on a topic, it's probably safe to say that they enjoy reading about
the topic. Write what you know, etc.
The difficulty is that there
are only so many programming books that are truly classics. While I appreciate
and enjoy learning from well written Hibernate or book on the Google Web
Toolkit, ultimately, any software book that starts to discuss a specific
framework will quickly become obsolete. As one of my personal definitions of
classic is a book that does not grow old with time, this means that a huge
percentage of mass market "Learn how to gidazzle with widget fooxily" types of
books will never reach the classic status.
Unfortunately, it
seems that the dominant type of programming book that is on the shelf in your
local bookstore are exactly the ones that will be out of date in a couple of
years. This makes me somewhat sad as if the market is for books that quickly
go obsolete, the number of people that will write books that go on to be
classics will be smaller simply on a basis of supply and demand. I'm not sure
where this leaves us. I like buying technology of the month books as well, so
I help this. All in all, it's likely not a problem I suppose. I guess I just
wish I could actually find Peopleware
So now I reach the real crux of the matter. If you are
reading this, then you probably read other blogs by various guys in the
software industry and they already have pretty much written about the books
that you absolutely should read. More, most of you have probably read some of
the books that Joel or Jeff have suggested in the past. So I'd simply be
duplicating content listing the exact same classic books and suggesting that a
serious programmer should read them.
So this has all been a
debate as to whether or not to do that. You see, I actually enjoy reading
reading lists, especially if there is a little blurb about why the book is
good. Every once in a while a wholly new book turns up and I will add it to my
'to read' list and I am the wiser for it. Still, I think I can stand up to it
and avoid actually creating a reading list of some form.
That
about wraps it up for today, this was more of a random ramble than anything
else. Back to actual geek topics soon enough.