Avoiding Thick Technical Books
I picked up and poignant tidbit from Joel Spolsky after listening to a recent Pragmatic Programmer Series or some of the O’Reilly’s Developer Notebooks, and I actually read all the way through them. I still buy plenty of thick books, but they’re almost always more reference types like JUnit Recipes or J2EE Web Services. I never read all the way through them.
The only recent contradiction of this recently is that I picked up Holub on Patterns after attending a talk of his at SD West 2005. I read straight through the first hundred pages or so of his critiques of Java versus true OO, and then blew off the rest of the book which was basically some elaborate code examples of many of the GoF Patterns.