Reading Habits

How many (non-fiction) books do you read in a year? What types of books are they? Java? APIs? Other languages? Tools? Process? Business? Other?
How about your colleagues? How much do they read? What correlation do you notice between reading habits and other traits?
--Mark

How many (non-fiction) books do you read in a year?
Probably 2, average
What types of books are they?
In order:
API's
Java
Process (patterns, etc..)
How about your colleagues? How much do they read?
They enjoyed to buy books and put them in the shelf. But I'd say 1% read them.
What correlation do you notice between reading habits and other traits?
hmm.. don't know..

I read two types of non-fiction books; books on programming (you can read my amazon reviews to get an idea of them) and history. I just finished this:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/030435967X/qid=1059364417/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/102-0086399-6431317

Besides programming (they all are in bunkhouse)
Gordon W. Allport. The Nature of Prejudice.
Joseph Brodsky. Collected poems in Englsih.
Michael Parenti. Blackshirts & Reds. Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism.
Michael Parenti. To kill a nation. The attack on Yugoslavia.
George Lakoff. Moral Politics. How liberals and conservatives think.
German Made Simple - a comprehensive course for self-study and review
Jacques Ellul. Propaganda. The formation of men's attitudes.
Ayn Rand. The voice of reason.
Howard Zinn. A people's history of the United States (couldn't finish this one though, too anti-American even for me)
Deborah Tannen. That's not what I meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships.
Deborah Tannen. The Argument Culture. Moving from debate to dialog.
Robert P. Stockwell. Foundations of Syntactic Theory.
Donna Jo Napoli. Syntax. Theory and Problems.
P.H. Matthews. Morphology.
John DeFrancis. The Chinese Language. Facts and Fantasy.
The Soviet Viewpoint. Georgi Arbatov and Willem Oltmans.
Richard Jeffrey. Formal Logic. Its scope and limits.
Sebastian Lobner. Understanding Semantics.
R.Lakoff. The language war.
G. Poya. How to solve it.
I do not remember if these are for the current year only, probably many are from 2002.

I get in about 6 a year. I always seem to have a stack that I WANT to get to, it is just so hard to find the time.

I like to read book, but seems always hard to finish cover to cover.

Hey Mark from this thread you can write a
"The 7 Reading Habits of Highly Effective People" book.

Mark

Off topic, I know, but...
Deborah Tannen. That's not what I meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships.
is a great book. It really crystallized many of my thoughts about communicating.
ms

I read loads! Most of my non-fiction is for uni so it kind of varies depending on module but recent ones have been on Databases, networks, testing, java and c but I read about 60 novels a year so always have about 3 books on the go.
I don't find many other people read much it seems to be popular to buy a book and then just put it on a shelf unread. I try to read all my books but there is always one or two which are impossible to get through but then having said that I have been surprising myself lately by using some of the books I had condemed as total rubbish.
I seem to read more books now I am totally addicted to amazon, they just make it too easy!

Some fiction or science fiction to spin down the flywheel at the end of the day...
Dan Simmons, William Gibson, Neil Gaimon, Robert Silverberg, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, Dean Koontz :roll: , Neal Stephenson, Douglas Copeland, The 'Fight Club' guy...
Maybe a nice mountaineering adventure...

I am reading 4-5 technical books by alternating them: in morning when i'm especially abtuse i'm reading light topics, during the day depending on state of my brains and time slots I'm reading all different books from easy to complex, sometimes i parallel with experimenting on my computer. When I am eating i switch to fiction then back to tech again. I like reading while seating in reclining chair with my cat on my lap or lying on a sofa periodically falling asleep on particularly hard parts. Sometimes i can dream about connecting to a database or starting a server (very annoying).
I try reading thick books from cover to cover to get aquainted only and pick up some buzzwords so that later i can find reference quickly (like Oracle database concepts took me 2 months to read very incrementally). Some books wanted never be printed because if they are good, in my hands they become so ... very used.
Before sleep i'm reading 2-10 pages of some theoretical book (that does not require trips to computer) and then - fiction, most of the time it is some mystery about murder or something. That is pretty much my reading habits.
Can't brag about efficiency but easy on the body.
Per year I'm total close to 20-30 mysteries and 10-15 technical books (thick) and numerous manuals and stuff plus magazines such as Playboy, tabloids (Star mostly, don't like Enquirer) and JavaPro . :roll:

I think publishers should take care to make sure that if a book is good then so is the binding - the number of books I now have sellotaped back together!
The longer I have a book the more useful it becomes just simply because I know whats in it and where to look for stuff.

[ August 02, 2003: Message edited by: Carlisia Campos ]

[ August 02, 2003: Message edited by: Carlisia Campos ]

I read roughly two tech books cover-to-cover each month, and most of the ones which haven't already been done end up reviewed here. I used to read 3-4 paperback novels a week, but I seem to spend that time messing around on the internet these days, so my leasure-reading speed is way down.
I've just come back from a week without the net, and in the evenings I read "Catcher in the Rye" for fun and most of "We Blog" for learning.

I average 1 technical book per month... wish I had time for more! I also read at least one technical article per day on the web.
I have worked with people who read more than that, but most read less. I think there is a correlation:
Those who continue to research and experiment in their field actually enjoy what they do, where those who aren't interested in learning new things tend to be the same people who constantly grumble about hating their job...
For me, if software engineering wasn't my job, it would still be my hobby, so I feel pretty lucky