I’m Feelin’ Blue So I Bought Some Books

It all started when I read Steve Yegge’s post “Getting that job at Google“. Here I am, a developer with 10+ years’ experience, leading 1.5 teams (don’t ask, it’s ugly) at my current job and the more I read the stupider I felt. By the end of the post I felt like the character Corky on the series “Life Goes On“. You know — a happy guy everyone likes well enough but is clearly not the sharpest spoon in the drawer.

The reality of my situation was clear to me. Years of focusing on the practical day-to-day details had silently but utterly eroded almost all of my self-taught CompSci knowledge. So I did what any self-respecting developer would do.

I fired up my browser and bought books.

Two of ‘em, in fact.

I’m just 30 pages into The Algorithm Design Manual and I can honestly say this book is worth every penny. The war stories and design patternesque presentation for each algorithm is wonderful. To be completely honest, the review of algorithm design basics, like how to calculate the Big-O for a given algorithm is a nice refresher for me, too. Sad, yes I know, but oh so true.

I also bought Applied Combinatorics since so many of the interesting problems in modern computing have some combinatoric element to them. Let’s face it, I’d like to not spend the rest of my career building yet-another-database-backed-website. I’ve just flipped through it so I don’t have an in-depth opinion of it yet. It seems written in an approachable style and is light on gnarly math. I’d say it’s worth the $12.00 I paid for it, even if it turns out to be a doorstop.

*sigh*

Some days I feel like I have so much to learn and I’ve already forgotten so much.