Desert Island Books · 9 April, 08:22 AM
Well, maybe not a desert island. How about an uprooted basement? I am faced with that decision. I’m about to start construction on that basement project and part of that involves packing up all my stuff in my office, particularly the books. I’ll be doing construction for at least 6 months, so I’m boxing up and storing everything I don’t think I’ll need or want in the next 6 months, for work or for my own personal use. So I went through the bookshelves, and the following made the cut:
- Rails Recipes – I haven’t actually used this one much, but I’m a sucker for recipes books.
- Ruby on Rails E-Commerce – I’ve learned most of what I know about rails from here. It has its shortcomings, but overall, it’s a decent book on Rails and you can get inexpensive used copies off Amazon.
- The Rails Way – I saw Zed Shaw plug this during his infamous “Rails is a ghetto” rant and bought it basically off that recommendation. I’ve read only a couple chapters, but I’ve liked it so far – it’s somewhere between a tutorial-style and a cookbook-style book.
- RESTful Web Services – This one made the cut mainly on the strength of its discussion of HTTP caching.
- Python Cookbook – I seem to find myself doing Python every so often and this seems to be the book I turn to most to figure out how to do something, or sometimes just to figure out syntax.
- DHTML Visual Quickstart Guide – I actually have a very old edition of this. That edition, at least, isn’t a very good book on CSS. It does, however, have a very handy index of CSS properties and values that makes a good quick reference.
- Transcending CSS – I’ve written about this book before. It’s a rarity – a computer book that’s enjoyable to look at and pleasant to read. It has a lot of graphics, but they’re information-dense; not screenshots of dialog boxes or wizards. This book has really changed the way I think about designing with HTML.
- The Zen of CSS Design – I got this recently as a gift. Transcending CSS is kind of coming from a specific place; this book deals with CSS at a bit more fundamental level.
- Programming Erlang – I’ve been frustrated by the code examples in this book not working, but I’m not quite ready to give up yet. Still, Erlang is pretty much on the back burner for me.
There are no .NET titles in my collection, even though I spend most of my time doing .NET development. It’s just not a technology that I spend much time on; I have a certain level of facility with it and I’m comfortable with that, but I don’t really want to invest much more time in it. I’d really like to do something useful and public with Rails and have some ideas about projects; so that explains the Rails titles. The CSS titles are partly work related, but mostly because I’d like to get better with CSS. So my books for the next 6 months are fairly tools-oriented, but with a specific purpose in mind.
— Gordon Weakliem
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