2011 Reading List

01 - Why's (Poignant) Guide To Ruby by _why the luck stiff (Free PDF Download)

02 - My Boring-Ass Life by Kevin Smith

03 - Learn To Program (e) by Chris Pine

04 - Dexter Is Delicious (f) by Jeff Lindsay

05 - Program Or Be Programmed (e) by Douglas Rushkoff

06 - The Agile Samurai (e) by Jonathan Rasmusson

07 - The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman

08 - The Art Of Agile Development (e) by James Shore et al

09 - Beginning Ruby (e) by Peter Cooper

10 - Everyday Scripting w/ Ruby (e) by Brian Marick

11 - The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

12 - The Afrika Reich (f) by Guy Saville

13 - Bait And Switch by Barbara Ehenreich

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14 - Poke The Box (e) by Seth Godin

15 - Getting Real (r) by 37 Signals

16 - The Definitive Guide To SQLite (e) Grant Allen et al

17 - Starship Troopers (f) by Robert Heinlein

18 - The Passionate Programmer (e) by Chad Fowler

19 - Adventures of Johnny Bunko (r) by Daniel Pink

20 - Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

21 - jPod (f r)  by Douglas Coupland

22 - Do The Work (e) by Steven Pressfield

23 - Ender's Game (f) by Orson Scott Card

24 - Everyone Loves You When You're Dead by Neil Strauss

25 - Fahrenheit 451 (f) by Ray Bradbury

26 - The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx et al

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27 - Nineteen Eighty-Four (f r) by George Orwell

28 - The Old Man & The Sea (f) by Ernest Hemingway

29 - Be Fast Or Be Gone by Andreas Scherer

30 - Slaughterhouse 5 (f) by Kurt Vonnegut

31 - The Fountainhead (f) by Ayn Rand

32 - Turing Evolved (f e) by David Kitson

33 - The Hunger Games (f e) by Suzanne Collins

34 - Catching Fire (f e) by Suzanne Collins

35 - Mockingjay (f e) by Suzanne Collins

36 - Read This Before Our Next Meeting (e) by Al Puttampalli

37 - Atlas Shrugged (f) by Ayn Rand

38 - Economics In One Lesson (e) by Henry Hazlitt

39 - The Black Swan (r e) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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40 - Damned (f) by Chuck Palahniuk

41 - Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

42 - Cryptonomicon (f) by Neal Stephenson

43 - Boomerang by Michael Lewis

44 - What Has the Government Done To Our Money? (Free PDF) by Murray Newton Rothbard 

45 - Mindfire (e) by Scott Berkun

46 - Thinking; Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman

47 - Snow Crash (f) by Neal Stephenson

48 - The Mindset by Carol Dweck

49 - Anathem (f) by Neal Stephenson

50 - The Diamond Age (f) by Neal Stephenson

51 - Fail!

52 - Fail!

Key:

(f) = Fiction

(r) = Re-read

(a) = Audio

(e) = Electronic

Summary - 2011 Arbitrary Dividing Point In Time Resolutions

1. Mind - Learn Ruby On Rails Every Day – Failed after 86 days
Started off pretty well on this one, i put in just over 500 hours in 3 months but ultimately learning Ruby On Rails turned into learning; Ruby, Rails, Git, Linux, SQL, Agile and what felt like an ever expanding list of computer science theory. Also the project that spurred this goal fell through – the customer had zero interest in it – which just goes to show Agile is for every project, even non-commercial ones.

2. Body - Don't Drink Calories – Failed after 178 days
I probably could have kept this one up longer but around 6 months in i really missed beer and it didn't seem to be making much of a difference to anything else.

3. Spirit - Write 750 Words Every Day - Failed after 281 days
This one really should have gone the distance – even when i was in Glasgow for 6 weeks and had to go to coffee shops for internet access i kept it going – one day in October i just forgot and that was it, streak gone, game over. Also while it was initially positive, eventually the enforced daily introspection just ended up a circle of the same ideas which was really not positive.

I haven't thought about any resolutions for 2012 yet, so the dividing point in time will be even more arbitrary if i do decide on some.