- A Sentimental Gen-X Programmer Culls his Tech Books
- Cocoa Programming for Max OS X Second Edition
- Danny Goodman’s AppleScript™ Handbook
- Database Processing
- Web Design on a Shoestring
- Designing with Web Standards
- Learning Java
- DocBook 5: The Definitive Guide
- PDF Hacks
- Programming the Perl DBI
- Translucent Databases
- XQuery
- High Performance MySQL
- Code Complete
Book: Learning Java
Author: Patrick Niemeyer and Jonathan Knudsen
I have no idea when I picked this book up. I’ve written maybe 10 lines of “professional according to Hoyle Java” in my life even though I semi-bluffed my way into a bunch of early career jobs that were java adjacent by pretending to understand it more than I did. Of course, these days all languages seem to be trending towards Java-style types so we’ll all be Java developers by the end of the world.
I was in college from 1993 – 1999 (with a few breaks in the middle to fundamentally reassess my life) and there was some Java around (more toward the end of my tenure) but fundamentals were still taught in C or C++.
I probably picked this book up as a legitimate attempt to learn the language. I worked a number of frontend web development job where the backend was in Java. This was a common pattern through a lot of the 00s before people realized that the rubys/pythons/phps of the world could do backend just as well. Also Moore’s Law.
My early efforts never really went anywhere because it just felt like the language was in the way. I’d probably be fine programming Java now, but it’s not a priority. That said in the past few years I’ve read a lot java services that other people have written — it does run the world. I’ll keep you’all informed on whether I get out of my career without working on a primary java codebase.