Reading Rainbow: Programming Edition

I've been doing a lot of reading for the last 6 months. It all started when I switched jobs last year. I was working with a lot of smart guys who knew (and still know) significantly more than I do about practically everything with regards to programming languages.

My first adventure was with Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp. I really enjoyed the concepts that the book introduced but I was very frustrated by the syntax and nomenclature. Practically all my programming experience has been with "C-style" languages so Lisp is something of a leap. Overall I think the biggest things I brought away from my time with this book were: functional languages are really cool and recursion is much cooler — and a lot easier — than I'd thought.

My next book wasn't CS related. I devoured Neal Stephenson's Anathem. It was a great read but I've been itching to go back lately and read it again. The more I read Stephenson's books the more I pick up from them. Anathem was very dense and I probably missed a lot of the good stuff.

Next on the agenda was Programming Groovy. I had no practical reason to use Groovy but I had been spending a lot of time using Java for work and was interested in what Groovy brought to the table. The simplified syntax and heavy use of autoboxing made Java feel nimble and interesting.

Finally we've arrived at the present day. Sitting beside me is a queue of books. The current one is Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World. I've got a list of programming languages I want to learn about and reading this will check one off the list. I sat this one down because I wasn't feeling some of the more complex "protocol" examples it got into. Luckily I mustered up some more tuits and skipped that chapter. The next one began processes and I'm really impressed with what Erlang can do. I even thought of a project I could write in Erlang if I wasn't so busy right now.

The next book on my list Practical OCaml. I've got it on loan from my friend Stevan and the quick glance I gave it piqued my interest. I'll proceed to this after finishing the Erlang book.

Looking back it's amazing how much information I've absorbed in the last 6 months. In the next few days I'll post another category of books I've been reading.