June 29, 2003
Move over Xlib, make way for something cuter
With six weeks to go until the launch of Baby 1.0, it's finally time to turn the office into a nursery. We decided that step one of this process should be to go through all the books on the bookshelf and purge the no-longer needed technical books. Zornitza has always expressed her suspicion as to whether I really need all of my technical books and I finally caved in and admitted that I could, perhaps, give away some of them.
I came up with twenty or so books that I could muster up the strength to part with. But frankly, it's not likely that I'm going to be doing any Xlib or Motif programming any time soon. And even if I did have to write some low-level X11 app, it's not likely that my 9 year-old books will be of any use. Web and man pages will probably do me more good. Same goes for my Display Postscript books. And it's Display PDF these days! Of course, I do feel some pain at tossing a first printing of Java in a Nutshell. Alas, JDK 1.0.2 docs just aren't that relevant to me anymore. Of course, the same can be said for Smalltalk-80 but saying goodbye to that would be too painful. The litmus test seems to be whether a book is technology specific or conceptual in nature. Thus, Aho's Compilers book stays but Mips RISC architecture about the R2000 goes.
