Reading was never something I enjoyed growing up, I lost interest too easily and never finished any books. In my late teens I started reading horror books, I enjoyed those! At one point I got through all of James Herbert’s and most of Clive Barker’s books. I’m not sure what it was about horror books especially, the suspense I guess and…ok…I enjoyed the gore too!!
When it came to technical books though I found it harder, they are not typically books you can read cover to cover, though I did give it a go! Some technical books are thick enough to take up the whole shelf on their own so a better strategy was to pick sections that interested me to study. The real value was putting it into practice, which is difficult for bedtime reading! But I got through books on Java and design patterns that turned me into a rock star coder…hmmmm! Even though it was arduous working with book and computer at the same time it was rewarding because of what I learnt.
Now I read a fair amount of books on leadership and process, don’t need to be in front of my laptop for those! I enjoy learning about other peoples experiences and thinking how I can apply different techniques to my workplace. A current approach to writing books is to have a variety of authors submit a chapter or two each, this certainly speeds up putting a bok together, especially if you Leanpub it! I like these books because you get a wealth of different experience all in one place and a variety of ideas on a particular area so you don’t need to trawl through different books/articles for many opinions. I find so much value in reading books generally, hope I always will!
What surprises me is when candidates during interviews say they don’t read, I often get replies like “books are outdated” or “the internet has more information”. It comes as a nice surprise when someone says they actually read books! Following weblogs or discussion groups are certainly essential for staying up to date but they don’t make books redundant.
So…the point of all this…I want to share some of the more recent books I’ve read and currently reading so I’ve put together my Reading List. I will aim to keep this updated! Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about them.
I usually have a list of books still to read, it’s currently over 20! That’s 2016 sorted! But typically only decide what to read next when nearing the end of my current book, so new books often come in and snatch priority…that’s agile! Have you read a good book that you would recommend?
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