Bookworm

In my youngster years I wasted a lot of time watching TV but with age comes wisdom. So now I’d rather read a book than to watch a movie, which I still do but seldom.

Since I have my Kindle, the two paper books which I bought a few months ago but not read yet are gathering dust in a dark corner.

The books are delivered to Kindle very fast (max. 60 seconds), most of the books are cheaper (although I don’t understand why some are more expensive), PDFs or Word documents can be easily converted, the device is light and comfortable to hold with nice paging buttons on each side. Plus it was announced yesterday on the Discussion Board that a new feature to lend Kindle books to other Kindle devices is coming soon. So it can’t get any better than this.

With such a fantastic Kindle reading experience, I will probably not purchase paper books anymore, unless the book is a must-read but it’s not available in Kindle format.

I’m currently at my second Kindle romance novel and just realized that I’ve been neglecting the technical reading material that I was planning to read months ago.

Since the beginning of this year I meant to study for my next Microsoft exam 70-567, to upgrade my certification to MCPD: ASP.NET Developer 3.5. There’s no specific self-paced training kit so I’ll just have to go through the ones meant for each exam but I haven’t got to them just yet. This is due to laziness as well. These kinds of books can be somewhat boring, especially because I have worked in Visual Studio 2008 & .Net 3.5 for quite some time so I am familiar with most of the things that are written in there. Now I’m already working in Visual Studio 2010 & .Net 4 so having to upgrade first to the older version is kind of stupid.

And let’s be honest, the .Net Framework Foundation describes basically the complete IntelliSense. It’s useful to know this but we can all learn it by coding. Practice is more important than reading the theory.

On second thought, I could just go try the exam now. But I have never failed and I don’t want to start now so I’ll have to think this carefully through.

My work is focused primarily on frontend development so usability is one of my main areas of interests. This is why “Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” by Steve Krug is on the top of my reading list.

I’ve also meant to read Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography since three years when I bought my Canon 450D camera but never had a chance to.

I have read instead half of Rick Sammon’s Complete Guide to Digital Photography 2.0 but that book is simply not written for me. I’ve already decided to get myself a copy of Scott Kelby’s book, which is the best one for hobby photographers.

So I have these and other books already in my Amazon Wish List and I came up with a plan how to juggle all. As soon as I finish Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, I will go through both Microsoft training kits and complete the exam. After that I’ll just alternate one romance novel with a book about programming or other interesting topics.

It’s difficult that I see so many books that I would like to read and so many programming topics that I would like to learn about but there’s so little time. I guess the only way is to prioritize.