This page is only about my first and longest-lasting love : books. For rather arbitrary reasons, I started keeping a list of books I buy (and then, ordinarily, read) at the start of 2001. This list grew into a chronicle of sorts of my forays into the intellectual terrain surrounding XP - starting, in part, from the bibliography in ExtremeProgrammingExplained. At some point it turned into this site.
Enough of me; on to the books.
My current book stack
ChristopheThibaut and I occasionally swap books : thus some overlap between his list and mine...
Read in 2006 (most recent first, favorites in bold)
See also
My "get around to reading those sometime, maybe" list
I rescued the following from Wiki:LaurentBossavit - I wrote it around 2002. I'm not sure how much I stand behind that list now(2009).
Books which define me
* RichardBach's, in particular One * DouglasHofstadter's : GoedelEscherBach, MetaMagicalThemas?, LeTonBeauDeMarot * StephenJayGould's and RichardDawkins', too many to list * JohnRawls?' TheoryOfJustice
The first in connection with my idealism; the lives we live are fundamentally the ones we want and deserve, love is that which defines our lives.
The second in connection with my fascination with mind and creativity and their infinitely diverse aspects, with particular reference to organized and self-organizing systems; my love of computer systems in particular falling under that category.
The third in connection with my materialistic and rationalist view of the world as a system fundamentally explainable, with particular reference to infinite diversity stemming from few fundamental rules.
The last as a unifying theme - I appreciate all these other aspects of the world because they are right in a sense that is moral as well as aesthetic, and (increasingly) primarily so.
Books which influence or have influenced me
* ExtremeProgrammingExplained * TheFifthDiscipline * FlowThePsychologyOfOptimalExperience * ...
Those books which somehow connect to the more pervasively important ones mentioned above; often of a more "practical" nature (in a broad sense) and not necessarily not those I would want to take on a desert island.
Hi. I promised a link to the origins of the "agressive incompetence" term I coined. Pragmatic Dave Thomas wrote, "Failure to train yourself to do the best you can is being aggressive about your incompetence." The beginning of the thread is here: HTTP://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/55146. --BilKleb
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