One thing you should know about me is that I absolutely love to learn new things. I’m always reading and asking questions; I’m not afraid to admit when I don’t know something or don’t have the necessary skills to perform a task. I also enjoy mentoring others. I particularly enjoy the social aspect of learning/teaching, but I digress from my intended point: Books!
I used to buy a lot of books, a lot of technical books. If you’ve been to my home I have a bookcase filled with, now, out-dated books from Visual C++ (oh god i can’t believe i just admitted i know c++) to Java 1.1 to Visual Basic Algorithms (thanks jamie!). However I also have, in my opinion, timeless tombs: GOF Design Patterns, Mythical Man Month, Analysis Patterns. I love to read. Might also explain why I have so many feeds in my feed reader (a much slimmed down 251 feeds).
When I started this career, my life-long hobby, I was actually going to school to learn the hardware side of computer technology. I had, and still have, a fascination with robotics. I just knew I was going to build robots. However, I fell in love with Assembler. I displayed aptitude in my programming classes: Pascal and Fortran. It was in fact my Fortran Professor that brought me on board to my first professional development gig; he had hired in recently and had asked me if I was interested in joining him. I’ve been writing software solutions ever since; this was back in August of 1993.
I was recently made painfully aware of my lack of formal CS education. Which is fine. I don’t know it all (though I act like it). A list of authors was rattled off (I recognized The Don [as in Knuth] and Design Patterns was mentioned) of which the majority I didn’t recognize. So I asked for the list. I wanted to start reading - so I can have a new set of questions to ask. Crickets!
I hdan’t received any feedback and decided to start with Google and work my way down to something useful. And something useful is what I found! Over on E7L3 I found the following:
So I’m going back to school! A sort of unofficial correspondence school. I’m way excited. And I already know of a couple of friends to help me with the “big” words.
Oh and one other thing: For the naysayers out there - you won’t keep me down because you don’t power my dreams.
Cheers!
You’re welcome. I’m sure that silly book is gathering dust properly somewhere. We are very lucky to work in a truly merit and skill-based profession. No one really cares what degree we have, just whether we have the skills, motivation, etc to do the work. I’ll have to check out those links too.