Career advice 2 - Learn, read, learn, read, ...

(Nur auf englisch damit du den letzten Tipp gleich umsetzen kannst).

This advice should be pretty obvious. But I meet far too many people in this industry who don’t like to read. In my book (no pun intended) it’s pretty much impossible to survive in our business without the willingness to learn a lot. And there is no cheaper and better way to learn than reading. I’ve always loved reading and I’m a natural autodidact, so that was not a difficult lesson for me to learn. I actually prefer reading technologies from a good book to course lessons.

One thing you really should learn is parsing a lot of text quickly for some keyword. Though I have that gift, I have no idea how you can learn that. You may want to buy one of the many speed-reading books or search the Web for some advice (look for speed reading).

So, what might you want to read? There’s a lot of stuff out there that may help you. Of course, the obvious answer is reading books. I myself am a book addict. And when you want to learn a technology from the ground up a book is often the best way. Also when you have a problem at hand, O’Reilly Safari Bookshelf often comes in extremely handy (though more for big picture questions than specific error messages). Safari is also available as a site license for groups of five or more. You may want to lobby your boss about this. Unfortunately no pricing is published for the site license.

Then there are application documentation, standards (I LOVE reading RFCs), weblogs, wikis, mailing lists and newsgroups. And of course there’s the Web as a whole. It includes many a gem that you really need just now for just your problem.

Overcome your reluctance and start to love reading. It’s worth it.