Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Books for Programming your Computer and your Brain


O'reily Books and any software programming published books you might want are now offered online for only $22 a month. What a deal! I remember weekly going to the bookstore and agonizing over what $40 or $50 book I would buy that week. I ended up giving boxes away to Goodwill or the local library and still have boxes in the attic of technology books that are pretty much obsolete now, like dHTML, JAVA, old Hacker crap and XML/XSLT. Some of which have value I guess as classics maybe, but now 10 books a month for $22 or all you can get for $44 is nothing to spend for a diehard need-the-latest programming junkie.

Ownership is a thing of the past. Get what you need when you need it and that's all you need. Just do it. It's 2011 folks. Paper books is a thing of the past and knowledge is virtually free.

Speaking of computer books, what is the single most influential programming book? Don't know? Well find out or cast your vote.

Does anyone remember the "A New Kind of Science”? It supposedly was a total game-changer and paradigm shifter -just to throw out a few world changing clichés. It came out in 2002 by Stephen Wolfram and I've not heard a word about it since until coming across a project management website claiming to have the author's life changed from three books with this being one of them. The other two are old classics that conceptually I agree, the ideas break down old mental constructs, but the books themselves are essentially dull. They were entlighting maybe in the late '80s when I read them. But now, I could almost write a more enlightening read of Chaos theory and Complexity theory than James Gleick does in "Chaos: Making a New Science" and Waldrop in "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos."

Still though, these are essential concepts to work into your psyche if you have the adaptive flexibilities still. (Most people lock in somewhere between 10 and 22 I think.) Better yet, I would just read Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski which has my vote for best overall paradigm busting, human engineering, Zen enlightening book. Of course Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is still probably worth reading to a young mind.

But you can get Korzybski's book free online.

By the way, I wrote Robert Pirsig a letter back in the early 90's I think--sending him a small manuscript I wrote that I thought at the time was parrellel in thought with ZAMM. He did write me back, explaining he gets too much fan mail to read it all, but yes he saw the parrellel of what I sent him. I never did publish that short piece of wisdom I wrote, but I guess I could have intro'd it with Pirsig's back-handed compliment.

Happy programming! Remember to feed your brain!

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