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vishers · 8 years ago

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How I Spent the Remainder of My Education Budget This Year.

I had an education budget that needed burning.

I'm a huge believer in conferences for networking, not at all for learning. People with something truly meaningful to say write it down. If it's something that's cutting edge they publish it in a journal. If it's something that's a little more ossified or lengthy, they write a book. If I want to learn something I read about it.

So what did I want to invest in? Well, there's a couple of areas that I've been eyeing for quite awhile and, as it turns out, these kinds of books are expensive, so I had no trouble whatsoever using the remainder of the extremely generous education budget my company provides (which just invites me to say, you should come work with me!).

Programming Languages

I've long bemoaned how little I understand programming languages at the meta level. I chalk this up to the fact that I've only professionally used 3 of note (Java, Python, and Clojure if you're interested) and I really wouldn't say I've given Python a fair shake.

Clojure and Java are pretty diametrically opposed languages but they also have a weird relationship because Clojure is hosted by Java and so Java things are easily within reach. I enjoyed Java while I was writing it but when Moore's law failed and I read JCIP I needed to head for hills.

Python's strange because lots of people I respect like it quite a bit but when I write it I feel like I'm doing everything wrong. I don't yet know if that's because of me or because of it. I suspect the former.

That said, I believe that studying programming languages, especially languages with vastly different takes on what Turing Completeness means, makes you a fundamentally better programmer in whatever language you happen to be using at your day job. I also believe that the days of of the monoglot programmer are thoroughly at an end. Even if you do managed to land a stable gig somewhere you're still most likely going to be writing software in several different languages. At my current employer we have a healthy mix of Clojure, Python, SQL, Chef (if you'll allow it), Terraform (again), Elisp (my baby), and Bash. Not to mention the various services we install and maintain. I simply can't afford to specialize in any of those if I want to stay productive.

So that's what I chose to really dig deep on with the remainder of this years education budget.

Essentials of Programming Languages by Friedman and Wand

What I'm most excited for in this book is a truly thorough examination of programming languages as languages. I'm hoping that this gives me a bunch of vocabulary and terms with which to explore languages as I learn them.

Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Tate

I chose this book because it's literally a guide to doing what I'm hoping to be doing for 7 languages. It's possible to teach yourself anything but it's often easier with a teacher.

The 7 languages covered are Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby.

I'm covering some of the same ground here as I will in future books but, like I said, the main point of this book is learning how to quickly grok a language, not what any of the specific languages have to offer.

The Go Programming Language by Donovan and Kernighan

I'm primarily interested in Go because Rob Pike has been trying to get the world to accept CSP as the way to organize systems for 30 years and he seems finally to have done it here.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!: A Beginner's Guide by Miran

I want to learn Haskell because I want to truly grok laziness. No other language of any degree of use is fully lazy. I want to know what falls out of that.

Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!: A Beginner's Guide by Hébert

I want to learn Erlang because people tell me that nothing teaches you about parallelism better than Erlang. I'm also interested in it's QuickCheck implementation although that may be proprietary.

The Little Schemer by Friedman and Felleisen

I'm mostly interested in Scheme because it was the language used by SICP, a book of nearly mythical importance, and because of Continuations. Ever since Kyle Burton tried to explain them to me I've been interested in them.

The Reasoned Schemer by Friedman, Byrd, and Kiselyov

I hope to pick up logic programming from this book.

Real World OCaml by Minsky, Madhavapeddy, and Hickey

Technomancy recommends OCaml. So does Yegge. Lisp with a strong typing system? I guess that sounds pretty cool. Maybe I'll learn to love type systems from this. :)

Let Over Lambda by Hoyte

This cringe-inducingly introduced book claims to be about macros. Clojure's never taught me much about those. I'd love to learn more.

Elements of Clojure by Tellman

Everything I've ever seen or heard from Zach Tellman is worth listening to. If he wrote a guiding philosophy book about how to use Clojure I want in.

Applications/Services

I think you need to learn about what you have in production. It's OK to be quick and dirty when you're rushing to ship but eventually you've gotta hunker down and actually understand what's going on. At least someone does. And I'm willing to be that someone.

Effective Python: 59 Specific Ways to Write Better Python by Slatkin

As I mentioned, even though I did Python professionally for almost 18 months I never felt like I gave it a fair shot. And I still feel like I'm fighting it all the time. It feels like a toy. I'd like a no-nonsense guide on how to do it right. You could argue that this book belongs in the languages section but, and I'm sorry if this sounds snobbish, I don't think Python's going to teach me anything interesting about languages or programming. Some of the most critical components of my employer's systems are written in Python. I want to know how to make them sing.

Kafka: The Definitive Guide: Real-Time Data and Stream Processing at Scale by Narkhede

Kafka is an important component of our data ingestion architecture which is basically one half of what my company does. We don't push it that hard though, and we still see some consistent, shady behavior from it. I want to stop that.

Kubernetes: Up and Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure by Hightower and Docker in Action by Nickoloff

My company recently took the dive into the containerization buzzcraze. I do not think very highly of that. I believe there's a ton of complexity introduced by it that people ignore because it sounds cool.

That said, it's the world I live in and I want to know how to be good at it. K8s: Up and Running is the book recommended to me.

Java Concurrency in Practice by Goetz

It used to be said that there were basically two vectors into the Clojure ecosystem: Ruby developers sick of performance woes and piss-poor compatibility stories and Java developers who had finally gotten around to reading JCIP, were scared out of their mind (👋), and had bad memories of C++ (I'm looking at you, Scala).

These days, though, I actually know a lot more Clojure developers (at least at my company) with little to no prior Java experience. This is a shame because Effective Java is very nearly required reading for writing truly Effective (or at least, Performant) Clojure. In fact, there's been a bunch of discussion lately among the engineers at my company about wrapper libraries like clj-time that are misused because the wrapped library was misunderstood.

Clojure's concurrency primitives are really interesting but they're hosted on the JVM and so thoroughly understanding Java Concurrency actually is important if you want to actually grok them.

I've read JCIP before but had to leave it behind at a former employer. I wanted this one for my shelf.

Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change by Ford, Parsons, and Kua

I heard about this book from Fowler. I generally think Fowler is always worth listening to. I'm hoping to continue to learn about architecture from this book.

The Terraform Book by Turnbull

We use Terraform to manage the vast majority of our infrastructure. It's always been something I've poked at until it works and then moved on from. That needs to stop.

Problem Solving

I have always felt like a very weak problem solver. I feel trapped by Cognitive Biases and don't really understand how to overcome them. I fear failure and it shuts my thinking down. I latch on to solutions that I see rather than thinking broadly. I want to be better here.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman

I'm interested in this because of the recent national conversations around Cognitive Biases. I distrust myself deeply, but I want to be smart about it. I'm hoping to learn more about my cognition here and to learn strategies for overcoming my biases.

Thinking Forth by Brodie

This could go in the languages section. The reason I put it here is because, on the tin, it reports to be about how to think about applying programming languages to the problems you face.

The Little Prover by Friedman and Eastlund

I believe that my revulsion to proofs in Math has made me a weaker software developer. Ever since watching through the SICP course I was blown away by the power of wishful thinking and it only occurred to me much later that the thing that annoyed me most about proofs was essentially an educated wishful though, just like I apply every day at my job. I want to be better at proofs.

How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method by Polya

I heard about this book from Rich Hickey. Rich Hickey's another person that you should just always listen to. Hammock Driven Development is a talk every single developer in the world should listen to.

One key assertion in that talk is the problem solving is not about innate intelligence or something that some people are good at and everyone else is bad at. Instead, it's a skill that we can practice. This is the book he recommended to practice it.

Leadership

The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Fournier

I've heard nothing but good things about this book. At my stage of life I need to manage better or I'm going to sink. I don't have enough personal time to leverage to accomplish all the things I want or need to accomplish. I've been on a long-ish course of study on this topic and I want to continue.

DevOps

So why aren't there any books here? Primarily because I already used some of my education budget to get books in this vein and I haven't gotten to consume them yet. I'm especially excited to dig into The DevOps Handbook after having read through The Phoenix Project, a book I can't recommend more that was given to me by Connor McArthur. It's also arguable that some of the other books I've picked up like the Kafka and k8s resources would fit in this category. But, I ran out of money and felt that the rest of the books on this list were more important.

One technology I really should be better at than I am is Chef. A big reason that I didn't buy a Chef book though is that there apparently aren't really any good ones. Oh well, I'll stick with the docs.

If I haven't said so publicly before: The Interlibrary Loan system is a National Treasure. So why didn't I get all these books from there? Well, for some of them, I did. I'm currently reading a copy of ZooKeeper by Reed and Junqueira and Building Evolutionary Architectures and I have several more on order. Sadly, these sorts of technical books can sometimes take a while to find. I had the budget, I figured it was worth spending. If any of the books don't prove to be worth it, I'm planning on donating them to the library.

Finally, what didn't make the cut just yet? In the interest of time I'm not going to be explicit about what interests me about every one of these.

Making Work Visible by Degrandis

Effective DevOps by Davis

Release It! by Nygard

Effective Java (3rd Edition) by Bloch

SICP by Abelson and Sussman

How to Design Computer Programs by Felleisen

Bootstrapping by Bardini

The Creative Computer by Michie

The Linux Programming Interface by Kerrisk

The Rust Programming Language by Klabnik

Compilers by Lam and Aho

Enterprise Integration Patterns by Hohpe

Infrastructure as Code by Morris

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Norvig

ANSI Common Lisp by Graham

Practical Common Lisp by Siebel

The Art of the Metaobject Protocol by Kiczales

The Scheme Programming Language by Dybvig

The Practice of Programming by Kernighan

Lisp in Small Pieces by Queinnecc

Clean Code by Martin

The Seasoned Schemer by Friedman

Purely Functional Data Structures by Okasaki

The Little MLer by Felleisen

The Clean Coder by Martin

The Unix Programming Interface by Kernighan

Thanks to everyone who recommend books to me and chatted with me on Twitter. I got help from #erlang, #haskell, and #go-nuts on freenode. Special thanks to fogus for putting together a really interesting list of books that I can't wait to dig through.

#clojure #reading #languages #haskell #erlang #forth #python #java #kubernetes #DevOps #zookeeper #ocaml #docker #cognitive biases #golang #kafka #scheme #continuations #csp

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