Frankly, I never had the time; probably because I never had the interest or the patience :-) Well, I have changed to some extent and for the last year or so, I have managed to read quite a few books. The good part is that I have enjoyed reading most of them. So, for those of you who are still struggling to start, you can do it too. Without wasintg any further time or real estate on this html page, let me list down some of the books that I would definitely recommend to you all -
- The World Is Flat - This one from Thomas L Friedman is a must read for folks into IT. It was good to read someone talk about the importance of China and India in the overall global economy. Some of the real world examples on the world flateners especially WalMart & UPS were too cool.
- Wings Of Fire - I like books that are less than 300 pages because I still don't have patience to go through a really long book (I really struggled to complete the one on top). This one is an autobiography of APJ Abdul Kalam penned down by Arun Tiwari. It was interesting in parts and inspirational over all. If I have to take back something from this book, it would be the fact that inspite of his modest background and a lot of failures early on in his career, Abdul Kalam really went on to achieve great heights.
- The Greatness Guide - This one and a few others by Robin Sharma like the Leadership Wisdom are excellent ones. I still haven't read the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, but I was totally impressed with whatever I read so far. I liked this book because it is not too verbose and is very neatly organized into 101 chapters, some of which are absolutely "must-read".
- Freakonomics - This one from Levitt and Dubner is again an excellent one. Just about 200 pages and a lot of data related to some of the real world problems and perceptions. It is more of a human behaviour & perception book rather than an economics one so don't get scared away by the title. Some of the data & analysis presented in this book is just too good.
- Beginning Algorithms - This one by James Ross & Simon Harris has to be one of the best written books related to computer science in my opinion (disclaimer: all I have read so far is some text books during my under grad and grad school and some books on programming languages). Agreed the focus on JUnit tests is a little too much and not useful for many of us, but the way it explains the data structures & related algorithms makes it a must-read for every software programmer. And by the way, the example code is in Java.
If you happen to read this post and in turn want to recommend some books to me, please do that. Bye for now and happy reading ..
:PM
