Happy Magic Fun Time with Kenny Meyers

Better III: Reading and Educating Yo’self

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August 11, 2009 at 10:21am

I want to write about reading.

I’m writing this series called better as a memo to myself, a sort of compilation of reminders. Right now, I have 44 RSS subscribers. 44 isn’t a large number compared to the big boys. I know I don’t have 44 close friends and I certainly don’t work with 44 people. I may have 44 enemies, but clearly, they’re still plotting against me as I’m very much alive (or for the existentialists, am I really living?)

You are 44 people whose tastes, skills and mindsets are completely anonymous to me. A venerable black hole of guessing what you do. So, to the 44 of you who receive this update, I thank you. The fact that you are not just a subscriber of one, or my mother, is astonishing and awesome. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of you was my mother.

My priorities have as a result, shifted, to make sure we all get something: crappy writing in tow.

The inquiry

I’m obsessed with reading. Reading is almost a crutch for me when I don’t understand something. Many people now turn to Google to find their information but I always find my fingers typing a-m-a-z-o… and so forth.

I studied literature in college. Your first thought should be: really? followed closely by: why? If these are not your thoughts, then you clearly aren’t reading the fucking manual. They were certainly in the literature major pamphlet that was bandied about our faces.

There’s really one skill I picked up from it: speed reading. I’m able to digest or read things at a highly accelerated rate with a good absorption to word ratio… and then hyperbole. I do change my style a bit for the web, as I don’t abuse the metaphors to personally spite Nathaniel Hawthorne.

When I read, I try to satiate curiosity. To solve a problem my mind has made more complex. I read to educate and to become better. I started this web-stuff by reading: blogs, books, etc. and I was curious how people I admire and respect, in their respective fields, learned to create such excellent material.

The Task At Hand

So like any good blogger, I relied on other people to do my work for me. I sent out an email to people I respect in various positions and asked them a simple question: What books or blogs have you read, in your current speciality, that have made you better at what you do?

Many people gave me great lists. Their responses, still drizzling in, are fantastic and wonderful. Some of which are quite surprising.

The categories of job are in no specific order. Granted, I am funneling people who have numerous skillsets into what they are most-known for. These are all Amazon referral links, following directly inline with “my give me your money for other people’s work policy”... patent pending.

Javascript

Karl Swedberg

Karl Swedberg who wrote the highly regarded book Learning jQuery 1.3, runs the fantastic site, learningjquery.com and works on the great (surprise!) jQuery team shares his list. Karl was kind enough to give commentary on specific books.

Books:

Blogs and Websites:

Jonathan Snook

Jonathan Snook is one of the best technical bloggers out there. He veers on his mighty Canadian jet plane from front-end to back-end, philosophy to implementation, like Scott Summers in the Blackbird. He has been a staple of all my various RSS configurations, and continues to be one of the finest producers of information for modern web development. Here’s what he had to say:

Hrm, over the years, it’s been a little bit here and a little bit there. I can’t think of many resources that have been consistent or where I always make a point to check back. The exceptions to that would be PPK, Douglas Crockford and then references like the MSDN reference and the Mozilla DOM reference. One more I’ll add to that is Steve Levithan which is mostly regexp specific.

A Brief Interlude

Both Karl and Snook show a great dichotomy that appears again and again throughout this article. It’s a difference between learning techniques. Two very talented people of very different backgrounds learn by doing, or by reading. I’ve heard this called the “Why” and “How” people. The “Why” people need to read and wish to comprehend the system before they enter it. The “How” people just dig in and learn from the ground-up.

Neither approach seems particularly better but propose a rather subjective question you must ask yourself: Are you a “Why” person? or are you a “How” person?

...or are you a CYLON!?!

The madness continues.

Design

Ryan Sims, who I work with at Virb and who is a clever and beautiful designer shares that he didn’t really read many books to learn about design or become better at it.

Here are the blogs that Ryan subscribed to where he “learned the most about design in my early days”:

Kevin Tamura, who I worked with at Blue Flavor, has always had an aesthetic that I find pleasing and functional. He is the most professional of designers, subtracting himself from the equation and solving a problem. His thoughts on design, while not vocalized on the Internet, but to me personally have influenced how I look at the final product.

For blogs Kevin writes:

As blogs go I find they are more transitory, they come and go over time many that I read over the years have gone dark with little new being written.

This is one of my favorite contrasts. Both Ryan and Kevin show this amazing attention to detail. I know this as I’ve had the pleasure and have the pleasure of working with them both. Kevin has formal collegiate training, Ryan does not.

They both have an attention to detail which is not only pleasing, but really hard to discover at first. I’ve milled through both their PSDs and discovered little lines that require a 300% zoom but add so much depth. Yet, here they are with completely different lists. Fascinating.

UX and UI

Who better to ask for UX and IA information then my illustrious ex-boss Mr. Nick Finck. Nick wrote an entry on his phenomenal, frequently update blog in regards to his top books, here is a sampling of those:

To see the remaining list please visit Nick’s post. These are Nick’s Amazon Affiliate links by the way, because he hordes his large piles of money in his ivory tower.

Programming

Mark Huot, the godfather of the EE extension, has the distinction of being a great developer and probably one of the nicest people you could ever meet. While he’s not as public facing as a lot of the Happy Cog crew, he’s certainly had an impact on the quality of their output. When I asked him about building and programming, he gave me a great response:

Unfortunately, I’ve never really been one for (technical) books or blogs, always preferring to dig into the source code and figure it out on my own. I guess the one resource I keep returning to would be the EE Forums. Outside of those, when I first got into EE, the community wasn’t as broad and the blogs/books just didn’t exist.

That said, I do subscribe to the NetTuts+ feed and occasionally find a good article about something I either didn’t know or wasn’t thinkingabout.

I then pressed Mark on:

Me: You’ve never read a single book or blog to learn PHP? Javascript? or Python?

To be honest, no. When I was into flash I read a lot of the forums at actionscript.org and EE I read the EE forums, but beyond that, I’ve always been a learn by doing kind of guy.

Kevin Thompson

Kevin is a stellar dev, who has helped me through some rough CodeIgniter situations (like the time I got really drunk and started hitting on CodeIgniter).

I’ve never been much of a book kind of guy. That’s changing now, but the majority of my programming knowledge over the past few years has come from blogs such as http://ajaxian.com, http://smashingmagazine.com, http://css-tricks.com, http://24ways.org, and http://alistapart.com.

He continues: “The blogs of various individuals have also been an amazing resource”:

One more resource I find extremely valuable that’s neither book nor blog is .Net magazine (or Practical Web Design if you’re buying it off the shelf in the states).

Writing

Tiffani Jones

When it comes to writing, there is one person I turn to. Please don’t take this as her endorsing my writing: she’s not affiliated with these terrible strings of abused commas, depressed apostrophes and misused pluralizationsss. In a land where content is King, she ransacks the castle and establishes a stronger, better Queen-based monarchy…perhaps even with Freddie Mercury in tow.

The gifted, talented, pseudo-hippy I call Tiffani Jones

Books in general

  • George Saunders.  Seriously can’t say enough about his writing.
  • Fiction.  Always gives me good ideas for word usage, tone, etc.
  • Philosophy.  Stimulates my brain, reminds me how NOT to write

Specific books

Blogs

The moral of the story

After reading and going over everyone’s lists (and adding Amazon links… cha-ching!) I made a miscalculation. I assumed that everyone I thought was excellent in their field, read.

Not only was I wrong, but I found myself getting one email with great book recommendations and another with great blog recommendations. What does this mean then? Do you not get better by reading?

Clearly, if you spend all of your time reading and not producing, it was all for naught. It’s like a cheap parlor trick or 10PM nudity on NBC: just for show, but not a good one.

If you spend your time doing, and since I have no context for learning this way, I question the results. How are you assured that the material your learning with is going to be a good way to do it? What if you learn by downloading a horrible framework or Wordpress? I am baffled, befuddled, bemused, bastards.

Answer this for me, ye mighty commenters and 44, and let’s make each other better. *Cue Reading Rainbow Theme*

The force be with you… always.

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