My Anti-Bookshelf
This is a collection of books I picked up at one time or another that are just plain horrible. I list them here as a reference of ‘books to stay away from’.
Do not read any of these books.
You have been warned.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series) I’ve had a few bad textbooks in my day, and I only wish I had to buy this book for some mythical 400 level ECE course my senior year. At least then I would have an excuse for having this book sitting on my bookself, looking at me…think you are better than me book, well do you? I hate this book…no hate isn’t the right word. I bought this book after college while I was in my ‘architecture’ phase, where I felt I knew how to create objects and make them talk to one another, but failed to understand how to string them all together in to a coherent system. This was also in the dark ages before I aggressively started reading blogs on a daily basis and still believed the best source of knowledge for software engineering material came from Amazon.com. This book is nothing more than a collection of things you likely already know, presented so abstractly that if you do know the patterns described you will hardly recognize them. I love the idea of a ‘patterns’ book of how to construct objects and systems, however this offering failed to bring anything tangible to the conversation other than making me feel I wasted my $50 dollars. Do yourself a favor, sit down with it for 30 minutes in Barns and Nobel, then promptly return it to the bookshelf where you found it. |
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Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) This book is written in the same vein as Design Patterns above…so you might be able to guess without reading anymore how I feel about this book. Loath is too strong, I’ve actually pulled three dollars worth of knowledge out of this $50 book. This book spends roughly four to five pages, ::could be more, could be less…I refuse to open this book back up to check for sure::, describing the MVC pattern, a pattern that was invented in the 70s and now drives most of the web frameworks and applicaiton development today. However, one would scarcely know that given the treatment of this pattern in the book. Nor would one fully understand how to implement a MVC architecture if given this book, all the time in the world, and a music montage as seen in any given computer ‘hacker’ movie. This book is the Cliffs Notes of architecture pattern books, too bad it isn’t bound in the distinctive black and yellow softcover casing most Cliffs Notes come in. At least then I would know what to expect. |
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