is doing his own thing. A few months back, Kathy Sierra blogged about the books that are on her “virtual coffee table“. Maybe this is obvious, but I’m an absolute sucker for books - in grade school, we’d order books from these little catalogs (I’m sure it was a fundraiser of some sort) and inevitably my parents would spring for more than a couple. I have very found memories of “delivery day”, walking up to the front of the room and taking my bushel of books back to my desk. A couple of times I weaseled out of the annual holiday play just so I could read during the practice sessions and if you’ve ever seen my Amazon account or, well, walked through my house, you’d know I’ve still got a thing for books!
I’m also a fan of lists like Joel’s management training program or Guy Kawasaki’s ten favorite books (and you can see what I’ve been reading…though it’s a bit out of date and of course my proverbial book shelf). Anywho, the other night I looked over at my coffee table and saw this rather interesting collection of books (sorry it’s a little blurry).
Ironically, I bought Beyond Java at JavaOne and, well, I think you’ll see a trend here (as evidenced by these entries from RailsConf). Can you tell which book stands out? I bought Java Puzzlers because I’m pretty sure anything by Bloch is worth reading (I cannot wait for the next edition of Effective Java) and, well, his talk at JavaOne was darn interesting. Anyway, I’m heavily influenced by guys like Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt, Justin Gehtland, Stuart Halloway, Mike Clark and several others (hmm, common theme - NFJS!) and given their propensity towards things other than Java I’m listening. That’s *not* to say I have anything against Java nor do I think Java is going away, in fact it bodes well that Sun is pushing hard into the dynamic language world (take a loot at Phobos). BTW, the other two books (as if you needed me to tell you) are Agile Web Development with Rails and Enterprise Integration with Ruby.
Just as a golfer uses more than one club to play 18 holes, I think a competent developer should know more than one programming language. Saying that I’m spending most of my spare time looking into alternatives to Java is simply a way for me to expand my mind. I was a tad irritated by all the Java bashing last weekend but there is an awful lot the Java camp can learn from the Rails guys (and vice versa I should add). I don’t know where Ruby or Rails breaks down yet, but I’m pretty darn interested in finding out…
