Bookshelf

[johnridley]

My bookshelf at work. Hmm, you'd think I wrote stuff in Perl all day long or something.
In general, the farther to the left (closer to my chair) a book is, the more often it's used, though anything beyond the MySQL book is pretty much a wasteland at this point; they're just collecting dust. That pink thing is utterly useless. Yes, that is a copy of "The 8086 Book" down there. Some days I wish I were using that more.

On the far right, PC-lint, used to be used more but I just don't do C anymore to speak of. The "Best Practices" is new and I'm working on reading it, the 3rd edition Camel is new too. Now I'm going to have to find out and memorize where all the good pages are again. I wonder how many years I'll keep looking for the table of file test operators on page 85 instead of 98?

Comments

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

Lot's more books than I have at work.

Lessee:
2 C++ books that were given to me, and I haven't used.
FlexiLint, but I almost never need it (Lint I use, the book, no)
CSS (fish), used to get the new Erotographs site up, only here because I loaned to to my nominal boss.
Opus Make - Long out of business, but that's the make we use
Programming Windows, rarely used.
AMD9513 hardware manual (printout of PDF)
OPC Manual (printout of PDF)
Digikey catalog

These are all on a 6ft high shelving unit. It sounds empty, but there's a lot of CD's, Tea, pretzals, and other sludge.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

The Camel book (Programming Perl) gets used between 3 times a day and 3 times a week, just for reference. I do need to read a few sections that cover stuff I've never used but really should know. The Best Practices I'm actually reading (and sometimes even agreeing with). Beyond that it's reference.

For subjects that I just need to find some quick info on, Google is the answer. But coding in Perl is what I do all the time, and since the language is half opinion, half nifty tricks, and 3rd half maintaining discipline when none is called for, I do like to spend some time reading on the subject.

I like C++ but I haven't used many books on the subject. I think I actually used a free online tutorial when I first learned it, then absorbed the rest by looking at code.

My Perl stuff has gotten to the point where I'm turning to Object Oriented stuff with it. It's gotten too big to be reasonably maintainable as strictly procedural code. Also there are other fingers in the pot now so OO lets me enforce rules a little better on my platform.

I picked up perl organically, and there is much in the language that is taken absolutely for granted by the majority of the users that I know almost nothing about. I'm hoping Best Practices will catch me up. The review pointed out a few things it says that I had just recently hit upon myself so I figured it was worth $25 to see if it had any other good info.

The problem with Perl (if it is a problem) is that it has so many ways to do things that you can get away for years programming in it and making working code without realizing that there are much better ways to do things.