Laptop, textbooks and notes
Time to Read
A pile of unread books is great, if it contains entertaining fiction. But a pile of unread textbooks about web development, even on a lightweight ebook reader, will become a challenge when technological change and design trends overtakes outpaces our reading speed.
Most of the information can be consumed more easily by the way in blogs and podcasts, and much can be learned during a project or a meetup. But it doesn’t hurt to take your time, if possible, to process backgrounds, history, and fundamental knowledge helping you better understand and evaluate the latest trends in technology.
Some of the intuitive gut feeling that might come quickly after working for many years, are hard to justify at first, but knowing your history can help, like: what is robustness and resilience, why are HTML and CSS more fault tolerating than JavaScript, and why is Postel’s Law still important today?
Looking outside of the box can prevent to implement requirements without questioning them, thus producing another website that only works in the typical customer’s “happy path” on a quick computer. Design for Real Life is one of those books, that will still be up to date many years after they were written.
In this post I want to keep hold of some books, blogs and podcasts that I found valuable recently. Some authors provide their content for free, they will be happy about donations or regular funding on Patreon, Steady etc.
Finally some time to read! Professional development often comes short in day-to-day work.
Textbooks, finished (including German books)
- What I Wish I Knew Before I Learned To Code by Ali Spittel
- Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher
- Inclusive Design Patterns by Heydon Pickering
- Resilient Web Design by Jeremy Keith
- CSS Secrets by Lea Verou
- De-Coding the Technical Interview Process by Emma Bostian
- Langlebige Softwarearchitekturen by Carola Lilienthal (German)
- Design Patterns by Erich Gamma
- Full Stack Web Performance by Tom Barker
- Entwurfsmuster von Kopf bis Fuß by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson (German)
- Patterns kompakt by Karl Eilebrecht and Gernot Starke (German)
