I go to the library every feew weeks and bring home a pile of educational/scientific books I want to read. Here is the list of titles I picked this time:
PHP
“PHP for absolute beginners“, Thomas Hanson and Jason Lengsdorf, 2014.
“Einstieg in PHP 7 und MySQL 5.6” (in English: Introduction to PHP 7 and MySQL 5.6), Thomas Theis, 2016.
Two pretty generic books on PHP, that popped up in the search. I picked them because they are relatively new and not too specific, I hope they will provide me a decent overview.
“Head first PHP & MySQL“, Lynn Beighley and Michael Morrison, 2009. I would not recommend to read a 10 year old book when your goal is to learn a technology; it’s probably outdated. But I loved the “Head first” book series when I was new to Java, JavaScript, Servlets, Design Patterns and more. They are written very beginner friendly and practical, very different from scientific literature. So I read all books of the series that were close to any topic I was interested in, and I’m going to cross-read this one as well despite of its age.
Engineering Management
Inspired by Jonathan Nightingale (see previous blog post), I want to learn about Engineering Management. He mentioned two authors or books during the podcast, but I didn’t write them down and before going to the library I didn’t have time to find the references in the podcast again. I need to find them before I go next time, but this time I just searched for something related in the library. Most search results were about agile methods like Scrum, which I already know, or project management techniques – no, I don’t want to study how to to Gantt charts again!
I picked the only title that didn’t fall into one of these categories, “Effective Team Management with VSTS and TFS“, Chaminda Chandrasekara and Sanjaya Yapa, 2018, although I have no idea what VSTS and TFS are. I’ll let you know once I read the book.
In total, I was slightly disappointent about the available content on this topic. I hope to gather some more useful references after reading the first books on this, hints are welcome!
By-catch
When intelligence services try to gather information on a specific topic or purpose, and they accedentally catch some unrelated, but useful information, they call that “by-catch”.
Nearly every time I visit the library there is some by-catch: I walk down the shelves to fetch a specific book that I found in the search engine, and suddenly I see an interesting book cover on a topic I was not looking for.
This time my by-catch is “Thoughtful machine learning with python“, Matthew Kirk, 2017. Of course I’m skeptic about the current hype on machine learning/A.I. by jounalists and politicians… based on the number of jobs and produced value this topic is way overrepresented in the media compared to ordinary software development (as in “just build stuff that works”…). But on the other hand, why not have a look and keep track on what’s going on. I don’t expect to require machine learning knowledge to apply for any job in the near future, but it’s quite thin and has a little coati on it. So there we go.
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