I love books. I’m not a bibliophile, I don’t collect them (at least, I try not to). But I do tend to buy a lot of them. In the last month I ordered a ton of new books about topics I’m interested in or actively working on. Most of them are on my bookshelf at work.
Database Books:
Oracle Automatic Storage Management: Under-the-Hood & Practical Deployment Guide
High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, and More
MySQL (4th Edition) (Developer’s Library)
Systems Books:
Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization
Ruby Books:
Practical Ruby for System Administration (Expert’s Voice in Open Source)
Enterprise Rails
Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O’Reilly))
Rails Cookbook (Cookbooks (O’Reilly))
Enterprise Integration with Ruby
Rails Recipes (Pragmatic Programmers)
Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails
You might be able to tell that I’m on something of a Ruby/Rails kick right now. Ever since I threw together my first rails site (which has yet to make it to production) I’ve enjoyed both the language and the framework immensely. When an opportunity arose to use Ruby for some scripting I needed to do for work I jumped on it and haven’t looked back. I built a simple monitoring framework for my servers spending just a few hours a day for a few days, and it’s currently in place for most of my non-production systems.
It didn’t take long after I had gotten it up and running that I realized that a front end was what it really needed (and, moreso, that a front end would make it more useful for my coworkers) so I am planning on taking the Modules I developed (which is one of the first thing that Enterprise Integration with Ruby harps on you about, putting everything in Modules) and converting the driver code that I wrote to call those modules into a module itself and dumping it all into a Rails site with my Controllers calling my Modules.
A lot of the technical folks I know these days don’t buy a lot of books. They prefer to google whatever information they need, and that works great – to a point. It’s harder to browse google when you only have a general idea of what you need. It’s also exceedingly difficult to do when one is offline, and I’m not allowed to drop my laptop onto the network at the office. Why work on the laptop at all then? Because I almost always have it with me, and if an idea strikes I want to be able to grab it and at least jot down a few notes, or better yet, sketch out a skeleton. You never know when inspiration will strike. This weekend it hit me while I was taking my son out for a walk (and all I could do then was send myself a calendar entry via my googlephone) as well as while visiting my relatives for Easter.
Plus, I love the feeling of holding a real, dead-tree book in my hands. I’m thinking about ordering a few more books in the near future as well. I’ll try to keep this area updated with any other thoughts about the above titles or books I end up buying.
