I know I have mentioned it before that one of my passions and (at one time at least, for sure) addictions are books.
Yes, sometimes I read them!
Right now I am going through Working Effectively with Legacy Code and the less technical yet incredibly relevant but certainly more entertaining Dreaming in Code. I'm trying to get through the former while at work, 30 minutes a day of reading when I can, the latter I am reading at home after the ripples of the hustle and bustle of what is my day to day at home come to rest. At this point I'm at about the half way mark on both, but doing more reading at home than I am at work.
Michael Feather's book has been recommended so many times in so many different posts that I had to see for myself why this book was in those reader's opinion such a must read. Jeff Atwood has it as part of his recommended reading list, Steven Smith posted a short review and recommendation after reading it as a recommendation from Jeffrey Palermo. For the fear you may have at this point that I post more references, I am pretty confident you get my point and trust my word! Its been read and deemed a worthy resource.
At home I am also reading Ship It for a second time and just recently went over Practices of an Agile Developer for a third time as well. To me both of these seemed [now] to be elementary, but yet so relevant, giving me a sense of "yeah, we are doing this the right way" and not because the books say so (hey, don't jump to conclusions), but because much of what is common sense extracted from the content of these compilations of ideas, past experience and the analysis of the results of their implementations, can be easily projected and extrapolated to the work we do, the way we do it and most importantly the way the people I work with have "learned" to relate, work, communicate with each other.
I don't want to digress too much, but there is value in mentioning all this because most of these practices are part science, part common sense, part keeping your head above the smoke someone or some group in the industry is blowing at some point in time and at every turn. It takes determination, self awareness and more importantly it takes focus to be able to weed through so much jargon and so much hype to extract what is really of value and what yield results. On that last point, what yield results is always a combination of some elements from "all of the above" with what works for the group, for its dynamic for its internal makeup of skills, personality, culture & traditions. Dare I forget to mention keeping the business needs as a primary focus at all times.
Ok, so I did veer off a little bit too far, but what is done is done!
In summary, the message I wanted to convey with this post is that one should read not only to learn the "technology du juor", which of course is a perfectly valid reason to do so, but also and most importantly after reading so many opinions and different points of view one is able to apply these to a practical everyday life as a professional developer (in this particular case), how one then may use the same books one used to learn to now assess our level of assimilation of all this information, to gauge, to extrapolate, to connect one's own dots.
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