I thought I would like O'Reilly's Being Geek, subtitled "The Software Developer's Career Handbook". It seems like a good idea, to have a book that helps you plan your career. The book is based on a set of blog postings by Michael Lopp, aka Rands.
The book explicitly plans to have minimal continuity betweeen chapters, the chapters instead calling out specific ideas. The idea is that you'll read the chapters as you need the information in the chapter. Unfortunately, this seems not to have worked. The chapters are opaquely named, and there's no overarching document which points you to one chapter or another to find out about a certain idea.
I'd say that the book needs a revision, in which a Guide To This Book chapter is added at the beginning. The idea is that that one chapter is designed to be read beginning to end, and points you to the chapters that explain one career arc versus another. Anyway, that's just my diagnosis.
posted at: 20:55 | path: /books | permanent link to this entry