Geeks on Campus

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Summer Reading

Posted by jeggent on August 1, 2014

I’m reading a couple of things right now that I’m really impressed with and felt like sharing with you all.  In a previous post I mentioned reading The Inheritance Cycle books.  I have just recently finished the fourth and final book.  I started to burn out a bit at the end there.  That’s a darn lot of pages.  After taking about a two week break I’m back to reading in the evenings.


Fiction Unboxed – The Dream Engine

The fiction book I’m reading, The Dream Engine, is actually the product of a really successful Kickstarter called Fiction Unboxed.  The description from the Kickstarter is:

Watch two bestselling authors write a book LIVE in 30 days (from nothing to print) and change how the world thinks about storytelling.

I’m not a writer, so I didn’t participate in the Kickstarter, but I have started reading the book that was the product of the process.  So far I am very impressed and really enjoying the story.  The book is described as a “thrilling young adult steampunk adventure”.  I’ve enjoyed a number of stories classified as “young adult”; Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and Divergent to name a couple.

Eloquent JavaScript

I found out about this online book from this post on LifeHacker.  I’ve been using JavaScript for years, some could say misusing JavaScript for years.  The book gives a really good background for people new to JavaScript or even new to programming.  It is really well written and I’ve already learned something useful in the first couple of chapters.  I learned what the conditional (a.k.a. ternary) operator is (ex. true ? 1 : 2).  I’ve encountered code like that several times in the past without really understanding what it is or how it works.  I was just trying to decide if I should start learning Java and Eclipse or game programming with Unity.  Now I can put off that decision while I read this and learn more about JavaScript.

I hope you are having a good summer.  Keep reading.