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.