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Reading for personal growth and professional development -  While writing in my architectural journal, I started down the path of trying to describe my personal reading program for professional development. I documented some of the most important magazines (Byte Magazine was on my essential reading list — 25 years ago), books and blogs for a computer systems architect. That got me wondering about what books or blogs I was missing out on. Was I missing something really important? To be a great computer systems architect, one needs to read great books, magazines, and blogs — and go to great conferences — and keep learning every day. So I kept wondering… Was there something missing from my essential reading list?  I started asking a few friends about their essential reading list. Uh-oohhh…  Some friends don’t really read much… (maybe they learn more by attending conferences, etc.) and the ones that do read,  might be on a different career path, so they have different professional development goals.

Context is Everything - For architects, computer programmers, lawyers, philosophers, and theologians - context is everything. The essential reading list for a lawyer is different from the essential reading list of an architect, physician or pastor.  I’m also searching for common themes, and patterns to reuse…

Is there a book (or a blog) that should be essential reading for architects (who build large buildings)  — and for computer architects (who build large computer systems)? I think there might be… and I’m getting to that… hang on a minute…. Are there books and blogs that every designer should read, whether they are designing websites, bikes, book covers, or baby-clothes?

The quest for the best - There are a lot of dead end streets on this quest. For instance, sometimes you find a really cool blog, but alas — the blogger quits blogging. Example: Loosely Coupled - a great blog for software developers and systems architects (covering SOA) - but the last entry appears to be from May 2006.

So, I sent emails to a few friends, saying:

What do you consider essential reading each day, each week, each
month? Books, journals, magazine, blogs?
What technical journals to read each month?
What do you read that keeps you going and growing?
I’m interested in your thoughts.

So, that’s the long contextual explanation as to why I’m building an essential reading list for various professions. Then I want to see if there are common themes — books, magazines, journals, and blogs that are considered essential reading by a lot of people from various backgrounds and professions.

So here’s a few books and blogs that my friends suggested, and guess what? Some of them were already on my blog roll, or books that I’ve read. This is not the distilled list of essential reading… yet… but here are some suggestions that are coming in from my initial survey of computer geeks and web designers…  not a comprehensive survey… (It’s kind of a list from A to Z – with the middle part still missing).

Suggested blogs:

1. 456 Berea Street - A blog by Roger Johansson. A Swedish web professional who has been working with the web and other interactive media since 1994.
2. AlertBox - Jakob Nielsen’s Newsletter on Web Usability
3. A List Apart - A List Apart Magazine (ISSN: 1534-0295) explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
4. Authentic Boredom - A blog by web designer Cameron Moll.
5. UXMag - The User Experience Magazine - Elevating user experience one article at a time.
6. Zeldman - Online since May 1995, “Jeffrey Zeldman Presents” is the personal site of designer, writer, and web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman was one of the first designers, bloggers, and independent publishers on the web, and one of the first web design teachers. We’ve mentioned (and reviewed his best selling book), Designing With Web Standards, several times before.

To be continued…

Tags: blogs, books, DWWS2e, web design, Web Standards