November 9, 2011

Swelling with New Shiny Books

So I read the wonderful Design for Hackers and I managed to win some money for books from a course... So I ran away and ordered some new books, and they just arrived today. Yay!

First off I ordered Introduction to Algorithms which is the de facto book about algorithms and it seemed like a fitting thing to do as I won it by doing algorithm assignments.

Secondly I've been wanting to grab Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs for a while and I finally did. It's one of the classical computer books you have to read once in your life (or so they say).

I wasn't going to get a third book, but on adlibris where I got the vouchers you couldn't pay with two vouchers on one order. So I had to split it up and it felt kinda dumb to not use it all... So I ordered a third book. I had no idea what book to get though, but stackoverflow came to the rescue! It's a bunch of answers to the question "What is the single most influential book every programmer should read?" and is like a top X list for programming books.

Incidentally I've got a few of those already, and the two I've already decided on was there (SICP is 3rd, Introduction to Algorithms 5th). Of course I wanted to get either the 1st or 2nd and I ended up choosing the 2nd one, The Pragmatic Programmer just because it seemed a bit easier to read. I've got a ton of fairly hardcore programming books I need to plow through so something a bit easier to digest should be welcome.

Go go programming books!

October 19, 2011

Design for Hackers has arrived!

It's here! After about a month of waiting I've finally gotten the book that will make me a design god! Or at least make me aware of something called design. Joking aside I'm really terrible at design and making things look good. Admittedly my programming art for my games has gradually improved but I honestly don't know what I'm doing, I just mess around until I get something decent. Maybe this can be a small aid? I even have some websites I want to design, and while I'm at it I want to try the Perl web framework mojolicious which looks totally awesome!

September 16, 2011

Design for Hackers

I get these.. urges sometimes. Not like Dexter no, but sometimes I just have to buy a specific thing. It happened again yesterday (or was it the day before I don't know) when I saw this post on hackernews.

It's a book this time, again, but this is something a little different - it's about design. Now I know nothing about design but I've enjoyed designing some sites and I really like to design games but I don't have a clue how to do it in a structural manner. I just try different colors and different stuff until "hey that looks kinda good" and it's done! That's not how you make something useful or something that looks good - good design. But this book seems to teach you just that!

It's a book for hackers, in the original non-journalistic definition, and it explains stuff in a logical manner! Now I might get a feel for why I think something looks good and I might even be able to improve on it? Happy times!

The only issue is that I promised myself to not order any more programming books until I've gone through the ones I have - but this isn't one so it should be okay! So now I made myself to promise that I'll do the math assignments for the week and then I can order!

Instead of writing this I really should do them then.

Hrrmm...