I skimmed through my growing collection of tech- and other non-fiction-books and realized, that it contains a good amount of books that I won’t ever read again. Maybe it is a chance to pass some of them on to people who maybe can not afford that many books. Let’s have a little experiment.
Giving away some books for free
How will this work? Just write an email to tim.zoeller@lambdaschmiede.com, name one of the books and tell my why you’d like to have it. I will then choose who to send the book to, free of charge, postage payed and contact those people for their address. I will delete the addresses afterwards and won’t pass them on to any third party. You are not guaranteed to get a book if you write me, as there could be many people to choose from. I have no experience with sending books around the whole world, but other people are doing it, so what should go wrong 😉 Find the books and a short (opinionated) description below.
Timeline
I am going on vacation next week, so I won’t send them out until September 2021. When a book is gone, I will update this post.
The books
Activiti in Action, Tijs Rademakers
Language: English
Introduces you to the Java-based workflow engine Activity. It provided a good entry into the world of workflow engines and BPMN for me, but I usually use Camunda now (which is a fork of Activity) and have an advanced knowledge on the matter, now, hence I don’t use the book as a reference anymore.
Learning React, Alex Banks & Eve Porcello
Language: English
A great book that taught me the basics of React. It is a little older now and won’t contain all of the latest fetures (e.g. I believe even hooks aren’t covered) but it delivers the basics really good. I liked that it started with pure JS before introducing JSX and really enjoyed reading it. Today, I still use React, but it is mostly wrapped by reagent, so the book did it’s job for me 😉
Why We Wleep, Matthew Walker
Language: English
Obviously, not a tech book, but might have some good advice for techies. I am a little undecided on this one. On the one hand, it really made good points about the importance of sleep and made me increas my average sleep time by an hour(!), because it made an impression on me. On the other hand, it claims to be scientific, while it is not. It cites a lot of studies, but in the end the author glosses over some points, and attributes a lot of things to the benefits of sleep without proper facts. It is also quite repetitive. This doesn’t read like a glowing endorsement, but it’s not a bad book if you are interested in sleep.
Clean Code, Robert C. Martin
Language: English
This is a classic, and it taught me a lot of good programming practices when I was a Junior Dev. Many of those practices, however, I have changed or adapted since then. Keep in mind that you should interpret the practices in this book as suggestions, not as facts that are chiseled into stone. Robert C. Martin tends to talk in absolutes in this book and I don’t agree with that, or with all of his “best practices”. But the book makes the reader start thinking about the readability of their own code, and this is a great thing to do. Bonus: If you get the book for free, here, you don’t need to give money to Robert Martin if you find his latest behavior as problematic as I do.
OpenShift in Action, Jamie Duncan & John Osborne
Language: English
To be honest, this book was a disappointment to me – but that’s because I had the wrong expectations. I already worked with OpenShift at the time, and wanted some literature to dive deeper. This was not the book for it. However, it will give you a great introduction to OpenShift and explain the concepts. If you know about OpenShift, and want to know what it is all about, this book will be useful.
Hit Refresh, Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols
Language: German
A book about transforming culture in a company. This summarizes how Satya Nadella “debalmerized” Microsoft and how he made Microsofts employees start caring again. To be frank, I loved it and it provided me with one or two perspectives about how I want my own company to be.
Who else has some books to give away?
If you have read that blogpost and were reminded about a lot of older books in your stash, that are just gathering dust, I encourage you to copy this and give some of them away. Many people in the tech industry can afford doing so, why not donate some knowledge?