TeaBass.com

Reading Suggestions

I never used to think much of weekends, just seemed like any other day but for the past few weeks I’ve been longing for the weekend. I think I overload myself a little during the week, working during the day and then coming home to program and learn more stuff by night, the weekend has become my time to switch off and slow down, preparing for the week ahead.

I do feel kinda guilty that I’m not working or making things over the weekend sometimes but I’m starting to come round to the notion that having a break every so often is actually good for you and improves your performance when you do start working again.

Any how, it’s darn lovely weather at the moment and I’ve taken to reading in the garden of a sunday afternoon. My reading material of choice comprises of development, business and economic books, see I can’t stop cramming stuff into my brain, even when I’m relaxing!

I’m starting to run low on reading material again (only bought 5 books last month) and I’ve been thinking about what I need to get next and who better to ask than you faithful readers!

I’m after:

• A great book to get me started with Javascript, with some DOM scripting and AJAXy stuff, plus if it focuses on Scriptaculous and Prototype that would be a plus, since they are part of Rails. Although RJS will take the pain out of learning a new syntax (and JS looks horrible) I’d still like to know what’s going on in there.
• A nice flash book, with Apollo out and some other interesting movements in desktop and offline website frameworks I figure that flash has got to be good to have under my belt, even if I’m only going to use it to make annoying banner ads that make stupid noises!
• And a book on general web development, something that briefly covers all the many topics that you run into when involved in web development, from marketing to bug tracking to business models, if there is such a book?
• Failing that a good Unix book to get my teeth into.

I’m not really after any tutorial links or articles on website, for one thing I find it really hard to read books on a monitor and I’m after something a little more indepth, but if you do have any especially good ones send ‘em my way.