A World Without Email 2

A World Without Email 2

I've decided to set this book aside for now. Actually I set it aside several days ago, and instead spent my time reading a book on SSL. I'm not sure it was great time spent- while I did learn some things, I didn't really find the ah-ha idea I had hoped when I started. I think this book probably has some good things in it, but I'm just not in the place to use that information right now.

I will say that the book I was reading, by Michael W Lucas is the kind of book I try to seek out. One of the best technical books I've read recently was on Redux by Nir Kaufman. Part of it may be that I'm not overly strong in web technologies, but the book was approachable enough and had an opinion.

The problem I have with lots of books I read, or technical courses I take is they try to make things too easy. It's more about creating a working project, like when you go to art camp and come home with some handmade ceramic mug that can function in it's intended purpose, but really doesn't have any other intrinsic value. Horray, you can make a shitty one off mug, but it's not production ready. It doesn't gve any thought to making many mugs that can stack, or survive in the microwave or dishwasher or any of the other things a production mug might be asked to do.

I think when I read Nir's book I came away with something profound. His book was more concerned about conveying his ideas about how the universe ought to function and how this technology gets you there. It was opinionated, probably more so than most books ever try to be. But honestly even if there were places where I might disagree with him, the fact that he expressed it that way gave me somewhere to start.

I think a lot of book / training authors don't really know the material that well. They read the manual (possibly?) and generate information that basically mirrors that, usually in creating a sample project. This doesn't help me all that much because I've usually already read the manual and I'm looking for the insight of someone who has implemented the project in a production environment.