Kathy Sierra asks, “What's on your (virtual) coffee table?” Here, in roughly reverse chronological order, is my recent reading list.
As I entered my books into LibraryThing, I was surprised that I had read so many books last year. Most of my reading is technical in nature, so I tend to prefer electrons to atoms. Two factors contributed to my reading more than usual in 2005:
- Our trip to China. There’s plenty of time to read on a 12–hour flight (especially when the movies are in Chinese!) I polished off four books on that trip, including the only fiction title on the list, which I purchased at Shanghai airport for the flight home.
- Starting a new job. Two of the books on my list are related to my new position as a trainer, and Kathy is responsible, directly or indirectly, for both of them.
- The first, Head-First Java, bears her byline. I purchased it after she revealed in an e-mail that “the exercises in our head-first books come right from our classes.” Variations of the book’s exercises have indeed proved effective in my C# classes.
- In that same e-mail, Kathy recommended the other book, Designing World-Class E-Learning, whose primary message is that students learn by doing (and failing); to teach effectively, we must let students experience what we want them to learn. No more Death by PowerPoint!
The only disappointment on my list is Gerald Weinberg’s Weinberg on Writing. I bought it on Johanna Rothman’s recommendation; she seemed to promise that the book would help me become a prolific writer. Weinberg is an engaging storyteller, but his book is really about accumulating ideas for writing: he advocates carrying a notebook at all times and recording “stones” (ideas) with which you can construct “walls” (finished works).
Ideas are not my problem: I have a long list of topics about which I’d like to write. My problem is lack of motivation. After 40+ hours of work and 10 hours of volunteer work each week, all I want to do is sleep or watch TV. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found a book to solve that problem.
Comments
Posted by Kelly on March 1, 2006:
Posted by CrzyDJM on April 5, 2006:
I just checked out “LibraryThing” and I’ve gotta say thank you for the heads up…
What a great site…
I’m “dmiller23462” on it, btw…
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Hey! I’m reading Learned Optimism too! My boss gave it to me. NO, not to change my attitude, but because I was reading a similar book and turns out his friend wrote Learned Optimism and he must have a case of them in his office. I especially got a kick out of the tests that show optimists basically skew reality. So pessimists are really more realistic. HA! My next question I hope the book answers is this: At what point then does optimism turn into denial?