code

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.
$25.00
Years ago I had come across a news article describing "deliberate practice" which is basically the theory that talented individuals are not born but made through 10,000 hours or ten years of deliberate practice. The Talent Code expands upon this theory with "deep practice" or the type of practice that, if properly honed, may lead an individual to world class performance.

Much of the information presented is this book is contrary to traditional coaching or practice advice. Instead of long, continuous, repetitious, automated practice, try shorter periods of deeply analytical practice, carefully scrutinizing your actions - or better yet, have someone else do the scrutinizing. Instead of motivational speeches and yelling, coaches are to try short, succinct statements zeroing in on the performance of the individuals they are training.

The Talent Code is definitely not your typical self-help or business book. However, if you are interested in increasing your performance or hit a plateau and just want to try something different, regardless of your field - then this book is for you. Due to the theme of this book, I felt that it complements Outliers very well, which is worth checking out if you haven't done so already.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
$13.95
The book follows the birth and development of an ambitious project named Chandler (Now you can find a Working Version 1.0!). The story is typical for virtually any software project. Started with ambitious vision and goals, facing a lot of problems and forced to scale back, a LOT of delays, and at the end (so far) kind of losing its momentum.

As a person earning money by writing codes (no comparison whatever to "star" programmers who show up in the book...), the vivid description of people around the project is enjoyable, and made me think of my own projects and how I work more than occasionally. I enjoyed reading the book a lot.

What is a bit annoying is when the author starts inserting his opinion, or try to generalize what is going on often by citing some other people's words. The analysis is usually shallow (I can easily see that he is writing for WIRED), sometimes imprecise or off the mark (which is typical of non specialist somebody who does not have an hands on experience). But probably it is a necessary evil since, if the author writes in a way that I am more comfortable with, the book becomes boring and thus cannot attract great audience (outside the professionals in the field).

I think the book is even more entertaining if the author has a bit more self-restraint and stays behind the stage. Not many people is expecting the author's opinion. I wish the author spends more pages describing the details of the discussion taking place around the project or what the author heard from the project members.

But all in all, I enjoyed a lot and recommend the book.

The Code
$28.98
movie came quickly - condition was new - liked the movie - would recommend it to others

Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction
$49.99
I have no idea how this book is highly rated.
It's a cookbook about everything and every known "skill name" ( probably ).

But can you learn something by hearing lots of skill name?
"Be aware of the difference between string pointers and character arrays".....

Skill is practical only after measuring trade-off and context.

Got lots of free time?
Then read B.S's The C++ Programming Language "again".
You will learn something every time.


Definitely Garbage book, waste precious forest resource.