I’ve read many books over the years, and most of those books were not worth reading. It’s likely I might have picked up a nugget or two of knowledge that I now (ungratefully) carry with me, but one of my greater frustrations is just how little meat some books have. Complicating the matter is my general lack of patience.
On the other hand, I’ve also tried several times to bite off far more than I could chew. Back in college, I bought this 600-700 page book on Akkadian Grammar. Yeah. I bet you know how that went: I floated around chapter 2 or 3, and might have pressed my way into chapter 4, but I definitely didn’t make it further. iblut, ablut, tablut….
What sucks is finding the world around you so curious and then having to battle impatience, dejection, and low-quality reads. I find I am an economical man – I prefer short books with something to say but which get to the point, and on rare occasions I find them.
I’m pretty annoyed with programming right now. To read the classic programming texts is often considered a sign of sophistication and mastery, especially if the names “Robert Martin” or “Kent Beck” appear on the covers. I’ve tried to read these books and have very mixed feelings about them. So many online authors write about how technologies come and go, but certain classical books teach principles, and these are what you should really be learning, but these principles have never done much for me, honestly. Moreover, technology changes, yes, but more in breadth than in depth. I learned CSS 2 like the back of my hand in high school. I still use it on a regular basis. In what sense was my knowledge of CSS less worthwhile that software architecture principles just because much has been added to it?
I’ve been attempting to read some of these “pattern” books, which refer you to logic patterns that are useful for various aspects of programming. And they aren’t bad books, from an information perspective, but I’m not finding them very useful. They’re incredibly boring, too.
And it makes me wonder, after getting trapped for several weeks on a task that heavily utilized our ORM framework (a thing that communicates with databases), that, gee, wouldn’t it be nice to understand the framework better? That would have made my life much easier. But the voices of the software celebrities keep ringing in my head, “Oh, but that knowledge will change! Our knowledge is useful for aaaaaaall generations!”
I grow…increasingly skeptical. Yes versions change, and so help me if the jerks at Microsoft change how Core MVC starts up ONE MORE TIME, but seriously, there is something to be said for knowing your technology really well. Just because it updates every year or two doesn’t mean that what you learn is worthless, but it will certainly make you better at your job than picking your nose with a few patterns books. Patterns aren’t going to write your Javascript for you. You have to do that yourself.
I think I was a bit foolish to take these elocutions so seriously. Drawn toward the things of the mind, I’ve long wanted to feel expert at something, to feel smart at something. Well, self, I hate to break it to you, but it may be that the best you can hope for is “considerable competence”. And you get there by being good with the technologies you use on a regular basis. Next time somebody wants to bump you up from Software Developer to Lead Architect in one day, sure, bust out those patterns books, but while you wait infinitely for that to happen, do yourself a favor and cut the crap. These patterns books are not helping, and you know what happens to books that aren’t fulfilling their intended purpose.