Comments on: No. Reading a book doesn’t mean you “know” anything.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:24:16 +0000

@Drux:

I hope it didn’t come across that I think that people that do not read (by choice or time constraints) tech books aren’t as skilled as those who do. That wasn’t my intent at all.

“So, if you could recommend only 1 technical book I get through this year, which one would it be?”

That’s a tough question to answer since there are so many factors…but it would make an excellent blog entry. Stay tuned….

By: Drux

Drux — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:54:20 +0000

I agree very very much with the main article. I’ve had a person on my team who said in conversation “Well, if you do that in your DB, aren’t you breaking normalization rules?”

Hmmm…. I’m not sure, what rule do you think I’m breaking? 3NF? 4NF?

“Well, I’m not really sure, I just thought is was a good question to ask. Breaking normalization is ‘A Bad Thing’ ™”

However I will say, I haven’t been in a position to pick up a technical book in at least 5 years, probably more. Outside of school, I don’t think I’ve ever read one cover to cover. Maybe one Anti-Patterns book, but only because it was just funny to say “Yup, I’ve seen that one…”

I do go to technical books when I am trying to solve a particular problem. However I spend so much time scrambling to fix stuff other people have written that I really don’t have time to simply read a technical book just for the purposes of reading it.

So, if you could recommend only 1 technical book I get through this year, which one would it be?

By: Federico

Federico — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:37:24 +0000

@Nick:
“The reason our culture advanced as far as we did was because of the written word; we have been able to easily pass our knowledge on to others so they don’t have to relearn everything each time.”
Of course, I agree with you. I’m not underrating the importance of books to acquire knowledge. What I meant was that, at least in my experience of developer, apart from a few fundamental books, you need to extensively try a technology on the field to become an expert of it.

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:11:54 +0000

I would list two types of “experts” lower than those who gained their expertise entirely from reading a book, both of which I would guess are more common.
1) Those who think they are experts because they completed some online tutorial.
and 2) Those who think they are experts despite never reading anything at all. I don’t care if you were to teach yourself the technology while working on a project (with the rare exceptions when you are taking up the technology so early there isn’t anything written on it). First, how do you know you learned it correctly? Our industry is full of examples of people who have learned some bad practice while teaching themselves something. And second, why on Earth would you try? The reason our culture advanced as far as we did was because of the written word; we have been able to easily pass our knowledge on to others so they don’t have to relearn everything each time. We can build on each other’s knowledge. If you didn’t take advantage of that, then you must have been either too lazy or too foolish. Either way, I’m not exactly impressed.

By: Federico

Federico — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 09:14:27 +0000

“An expert is someone who has made all possible mistakes in a very narrow field”. This quote by Niels Bohr is one of my favorite. Obviously one book is not enough to make you an expert of anything, nor would hundreds of books. Reading, of course, is an important fraction of the learning process but can never supersede experience, especially in our trade. I usually read tech books when I need an introduction to some subject I am interested in or when I need a reference but for the most cases, I find more profitable to try by myself and put the “theory” to test.

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:41:46 +0000

@vngdeveloper:

I totally agree and I think we’re saying the same thing. I’m just weary of the “instant expert” syndrome that I keep seeing in certain people.

I read your linked blog posting and it was dead on. I am also amazed at the number of developers that don’t take time to keep up even at a basic level. I have met a few developers that seem almost proud of claiming they haven’t read any development related since they left college, high school, etc. etc.

Here at my current place of employment we actually have written screening questions (just two) with the first one being “Name 4 people or books that have greatly influenced you as a software developer?” We’ve avoided a ton of possibly painful interviews simply by seeing people’s answer to those two questions. Seriously, we’ve had people with 5+ years of experience who list “Teach Yourself Java Programming in 21 Days” as one of the books that “greatly influenced” them.

By: vgndeveloper

vgndeveloper — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:08:09 +0000

Reading a book doesn’t make you an expert, but it helps a lot to introduce you in a topic. A decent technical book would provide a learning framework and good coverage on the topic it discusses. I recommend you read this post:
http://www.buunguyen.net/blog/when-you-learn-new-things-learn-from-books.html

By: raveman

raveman — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 07:04:55 +0000

plus many times if you read one book on any subject its like you read them all. I maybe read like 5 really good books, most of them are uber crap. i really lost faith in books when i saw so many books on ajax and some of them were not very short. its like reading book on how to parse string (no1 has written it yet, i think its a great idea for a book, indexOf is more complicated than ajax).

however many times its very hard to get a reason to do some hardcore stuff in any technology and to do it just to get experiance its not something i willing to do.