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This is short update as I'm really busy recently and it looks will be till mid-October. Tech: HTML5 Canvas Tutorial by Eric Rodwell   - really good site! Strongly recommended! HTML5 Canvas Cookbook by Eric Rowell  - tutorial is better because interactive :) If you're going to run all code samples and play with them then it makes sense to buy it. Of course buying this book is a good way to help author :) Clojure - Functional Programming for the JVM - unfortunately it is too boring for me, long and lacks any story/structure. Maybe good to easy find something you need by Ctrl-F. (No link because this is boring :) Non-tech: Painted Man - Petera V. Bretta. - rather good 6/10 The Battle for Skandia: Book Four (Ranger's Apprentice) by John Flanagan - good for lazy day :) - without image :)  short "How to read faster"  from personalMBA - really short and I knew most of it... The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, Book...

This will be short update! Books that I will talk about on today's  ReadingClub : SICP Really good and hard book. Right now I stumble upon many ideas that I read in SICP in very different places :)  Most of it is around Functional Programming and Clojure but still. The Modern Web by Peter Gasston Really good book about newest API's. It's still fresh so it's worth to read it!  Paranormality: Why we believe the impossible by  Prof. Richard Wiseman Awesome book! It's great to see how I've been fooled :) Being Geek by Michel Loop I was disappointed by this one. It's mostly about geek being team leader or manager. I'm not so much interested in it.  Functional JavaScript by Michael Fogus I have really high expectations about this book but unfortunately I feel that I miss something in it. Probably context of me and author are too different. One of the ideas in book started to make sense to me while learning mo...

Last wednesday group of 7 people (progres! :) meet and talked about book and I found it really fun to organize it.  Unfortunately One book that I wanted to read last month was to big for me (SICP). Right now I'm at about 60% of it...   About 50% I have decided to read something lighter and make small break. For that I have started One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way by Robert Maurer Ph.D. Filozofia Kaizen : This if Polish translation of this short book and I found it really fun and easy to read. I like how agile (even agilemanifesto) it is. I have read for those small little ideas in this book. I'm still thinking how practical it is in the long term without help of coach/friend that would help you decide what you want to do and when to change this one small thing to something slightly bigger. Takeout: Try revolutionary changes in life but if failed go to Kaizen (or start with it) and build habit fixing you life one small/silly problem at ...

If you want to learn JavaScript but you are short on money  http://jsbooks.revolunet.com/ is really impressive initiative to create list of free books on JavaScript and front end development.  I have read some of them and they are really good books. Free doesn't mean they are worse than paid ones.

My plans from last month went all wrong... I've done much less that I planned and at the same time I have read 4 really long books that I got for birthday (sum about 2600 pages) so I've spend two entire weeks on them. But let's review some books: Design for Hackers by David Kadavy This is really good book! I can strongly recommend it. I'm not really any graphic designer, or really into drawing but nonetheless book was fun. For me it was great to get general ideas about graphics and design. Some rules are really, really old and I sill remember some of them from my primary school, it was great refresher! If you want to know more about design just read it :) Lean Startup by Eric Ries  Book is good but next to me in the office sits guy that talks about ideas from this book all the time so it wasn't really "new" and revolutionary for me. Many times I get frustrated by slow pace of book (because I know it), but it is easy to understand ...

From  last month I managed to have finished almost everything (counting some changes in my plans). Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce A. Tate Cover above. Really good book to get taste of different kinds of languages and paradigms. I have spend only 2 weeks on this book because I wanted to get more informed about them, not to learn them deeply. For me it was also chance to be less ignorant in terms of functional languages, especially Erlang, Clojure and Haskell. After reading it I will probably dig more deeply into Clojure/LISP or Haskell. These two looks really impressive and challenging.  Maximize Your Memory Power by Nishant Kasibhatla Really good book full of examples. I really started using some of this techniques. Cheap and short. I can recommend it  :) Make: Electronics. Learning Through Discovery By Charles Platt (3rd chapter) I have learnt how to solder and learnt that my previous attempts were cold solders(?) and were just weak. Right ...

From time to time I stumble upon one of roules in this manifesto. I strongly recommend to get to know them and just try use use them. http://minifesto.org/ Right now for me the first one is the hardest :( Fight for Pareto - dropping features. This is many times connected with Synthesis and working in company/team when there is someone else that designes and plans what to do next in product. Points in manifesto aren't new, and they can be found in many other manifesto's but I think that it's worth a couple of minutes to read them again from time to time.