Saturday, June 04, 2011

Invest in Yourself (IIY) - Get good technical resources

Been working with lots of new technology in the last 8 months Grails, ActiveMQ, HTML5 and added to that now managing a team with 7 developers who report directly to me.

In the past my approach to gaining knowledge on Microsoft technologies would be MSDN (believe it or not) and non-MS lot's of Google & free online tutorials but many times I wouldn't be able to find enough information to make me really productive and able to give directions to my team in a timely manner. I finally came to the conclusion, I need access to the experts who can get me the information I need quickly. In my search I realized one key thing about most of the experts, they write books so why am I googling all over the place.

That's when I made up my mind to make a major financial investment in myself... I got a Safari account for a whopping $9.99/month! Now I have access to over 8,000 technical books along with videos, articles and rough cuts... i've had a good time with it so far, tough questions have been answered in minutes and not days on Google.

Here are some of the books i'm reading on their site right now.
  1. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin
  2. iPhone SDK Application Development by Jonathan ZdZiarski
  3. Groovy and Grails Recipes by Bashar Abdul-Jawad


Those are on my bookshelf now but they're others I've read such as
Grails in Action & Pro HTML5 Development.

So my recommendation spend ten bucks :)

Check out Safari's Repository today for the price of a cheap lunch!

1 comment:

Cordell Lawrence said...

Thanks for the information Delton. While there is a whole lot of information on the web, reading a book from the experts (the ones that can write well at least) is like sitting and taking a class from them. Will definitely check it out.