iamacp.com – I Am A Computer Programmer
All about the daily work issues of a Java/J2EE Computer Programmer

Good afternoon and Happy Thanksgiving here from Tampa, Florida! It’s a nice pleasant 68 degrees right now. This photograph below is what  I took a few hours ago during my usual walk through the neighborhood.  It was about 60 outside when I took it. I would like to express my thanks for having a great job in a most amazing place and great friends and family who are so far away.

I’m  finally starting to see the results of my effort to reach my goal to read 50 books within the next 5 years.  A few days ago I just finished reading Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript by Robin Nixon. It a great book  about by the O’Reilly series of books.  I highly recommend any of the O’Reilly books to everyone is serious about improving there technical skills in any topic.

My goal is now 2% ( (100% / 50) * 1 Book) completed. While it may seem I have such a long way to go every book helps put me 1 step closer to reaching my goal.

In the coming months my plan is to purchase a Amazon Kindle which will allow me to more easily and quickly enable to read more books faster. It’s not the easiest thing in the world trying to hold and read a 400-500+ page computer book comfortably.  Storing them and finding them is another matter as well.  Getting a Kindle should solve most of these problems in the coming months.

Knowledge is power and for a computer programmer the more knowledge you have the better. I have come to the conclusion that I am not reaching my full potential as a computer programmer. When it comes to doing a job sure I manage and struggle sometimes to get a task done. Why is this? I do not think I have enough background knowledge on the technologies being used. This is 50% of the problems that I encounter on a given job.

I have come to a  reasonable solution to my problem. I can and will read way more books than I have been reading. I will set myself to a realistic goal of reading 50 computer books by January 1, 2015 . Doing this will allow me to be a more confident and knowledgeable programmer than I am now. I will keep updated on my progress in this blog to show how close I am to reaching this goal.