A lot of things have been sparking my interest lately. Namely working with PHP day in and day out has grown redundant, so I'm off to finding new things to quench my insatiable desire of learning new things. It didn't take me long to figure out what I was going to do, either: I'm going to read one new book every week for the rest of the summer, sponsored by Amazon's willingness to take my money.

I don't really have a road map on what I'll be reading, but I do have a few books already waiting for me. I guess I was a little too excited for my new found hobby and slaughtered my first book in two days, so that was this week. Now it's all practical in my downtime from cheering on the Magic and Red Wings to their decisive victories.

Head First Java

I've wanted to learn Java for awhile but never really got around to it. I had tinkered around with it back in high school when I convinced my web design teacher that me droning around on HTML tutorials was a monumental waste of time, so she assigned Java/JSP to me. Outside of that, however, my use has been very marginal.

I lurked StackOverflow for Java book recommendations and it seemed pretty unanimous that Head First Java was the way to go. Many warned that some people enjoy the delivery and some do not. I gotta say, I've never read a book on programming that is able to communicate everything so simply. But honestly, I wasn't a particular fan of the format not because of the conversational approach, but the utter chaos of the page layouts. I got over it--the tone and attitude of the book was a welcomed change from the typical monotonous style of most programming books. For those who are already language savvy, it can feel like they're holding hands too much, but at least you're not going to get lost, ever.

Though I've only scratched the surface of Java I can claim I know it. It's an act of will for me to sit down and read a book for more than 30 minutes, and I was able to sit down and knock out half of the book in one sitting and the second half in the other. I would definitely recommend the book to anyone. I'm intrigued by the series of books--I'll certainly be referring people to them who are looking to jump into the scene.

Next on the List

My dad is real big on stock trading and I've always taken keen interest in the art as well. My book collection is roughly split in half Computer Science / Business & Finance. So I bought a book he recommended me: The Essential Buffett by Robert G. Hagstorm. I'm super stoked on cracking this one open.

I may end up alternating programming / finance every week. We'll see how that turns out.