New blog domain: kula.blog

By K -
It's still work in progress but new posts will be published on  https://kula.blog/ Thanks to 11ty base blog RSS is working from the start so it should be easy to add to your reader if you still use any :) If now then I hope you can sign up to the newsletter where I'll be publishing new posts and interesting articles to it from time to time. Please use  kula.blog  from now on.
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September Update - The Healthy Programmer

By K -
This is a long time since last post in August. From that time much happen and I have read a couple of books and failed in some other ways but first go with reviews.

Finished:

World War Z by Max Brooks.
I liked this book and can recommend it. Easy to read. It's written as stories from zombie war but it's much more than that. There are polytics, current black market (and zombie world black market of course) but there's much more in a book than I though.
I can give it 7/10 (and this is really good value).


You Are Now Less Dumb by David MacRaney.
I bought this book the day it was published. I have already knew some of the chapters but most of them were amazing. I loved the ones about stories. Just awesome. This book gets solid 9/10 from me :)



MongoDB Course
I have failed, mostly due to my scheduled holiday when I was offline. This makes me sad and happy at the same time, but fortunately it start's all over from 21 of October! :)

Memrise: Upper Intermediate Course
Kind of the same thing, but I found that it's really hard to me to force myself to only memrise without mixing it with any book. Last month I have tried to constrain myself to only two things at a time: mongo+memrise and it was really hard. I works much better when I can freely mix more things but I'm going to experiment with constraints.


So time for things outside of my plans:

LearnLayout. http://learnlayout.com/
Not really a book but nice site that was long on my waiting list.
Took maybe 5 or 10 minutes. Really liked it and can anyone that want's to learn or refresh his layout skills. Bonus points for covering new CSS3 layout methods :)



The Healthy Programmer: Get Fit, Feel Better, and Keep Coding by Joe Kutner
Really good book. It's really obvious how much research and experiments author needed to analyze/read to write this book. Obviously things to do are much simpler than what you might expect. To be healthy you don't need need to spent much time or effort into it so I really like to put as much as possible from book to my life :)  8/10 and I can recommend it to anyone with sedentary job.




Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt
It took me long to finally read this book but I know why I procrastinated so long. I know most of advices from this book plus I disagree with some of them and they failed to convince me. Good book for someone just out of school. 5/10 because half of book is really good.


Good Math by Mark C. Chu-Carroll
I have mixed feelings about this one. It wasn't book I wanted to read so I'm disappointed. It wasn't easy and author lost me at least once (when talking about proving/axioms/logic). It's hard to read code in Prolog and Haskell as explanations :/ But at the same time I liked it. This book is really about theoretical Math, but it looks like it much more practical that I thought :) I'll give it 7/10 but this really depends on context of a reader.



Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0 (4th edition): The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide by Dave Thomas, with Chad Fowler and Andy Hunt
I'm not really using ruby right now but it's good to read more about different language from time to time :) I must say that I read only half of the book because the other half look like manual and without actually writing in ruby right now I think it would be waste of my time to read it now.
Book is really good but I think that while reading it I appreciated "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" for exposing me to ruby. I have already understood blocks (or at least know that there is something like that) and it really helped :) I can gave this book 6/10 but probably someone else can give it more but I don't think anyone can rate it lower. Pretty good book for ruby.



The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero http://shapeofdesignbook.com/
Really abstract book about design but after reading "Pragmatic Programmer" I get some new ideas about design in programming (like architecture or APIs). There are good stories in this book. It's short so even if you aren't interested in Design I can recommend it. Really good book. If you're a designer then just read it! 8/10 from me.


The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare
I have started it curious about movie and first book was better than I expected so I have spent some more time to read till the end but beside taking the time when I was too tired to read something harder there is not much in those books. Maybe I just more like bad endings? Or at least not only good endings? I don't know but this next two books get only 3/10.

My plans for now:

  1. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold
  2. Node.js in Action MEAP (but there is no mobi or even hardcover version available :(. Hope to have time to read it)
  3. Seven Databases in Seven Weeks by Eric Redmond
  4. Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone
  5. Memrise - just learn some new words from time to time :)
  6. MongoDB - starts 21 of October
  7. 19 of October - I'm going to attend Meet.js Summit in Gdańsk! 
  8. Today: Talk about Meet.js Krakow with other organizers and attend ReadingClub :)
  9. From next week going to attend Krav-Maga on Tuesdays.
  10. I find my lack of design and drawing skills annoying so I think about some new books about GIMP or Inkscape but maybe I should learn photoshop? Don't know. Appreciate advice here. 




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