The Node Book Club met yesterday at 6:30pm to discuss our first reading – the original paper on Hamming codes. There was a lot of interesting discussion about the history of computing (from mechanical relays to modern consumer radios), and many other topics. (Disclosure: I missed a lot of discussion because I thought the meeting was at 7:30pm. Whoops!)
Our next meeting is currently scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 9th, at 7:30pm. We’ll be reading Bruce Tate’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, published by the Pragmatic Programmers.
From the publisher:
You should learn a programming language every year, as recommended by The Pragmatic Programmer.
But if one per year is good, how about Seven Languages in Seven Weeks? In this book you’ll get a
hands-on tour of Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby. Whether or not your favorite
language is on that list, you’ll broaden your perspective of programming by examining these languages
side-by-side. You’ll learn something new from each, and best of all, you’ll learn how to learn a language quickly.
The book can be purchased in ebook (epub/mobi/PDF) form and (when they’re back in stock) paperback from their website. It can also be found online and in some stores at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
Our next meeting is less than seven weeks away, so we don’t expect anyone to make it all the way through the book and all of its activities. Feel free to skim it at a high level, read about the languages that are the most (un)familiar to you, or just pick a couple of really interesting/different languages and dive in. The hope is that we’ll learn some new and interesting things about the theory behind these languages, how to find similarities between languages, learn new tricks for picking up a new language, and get a lot of inspiration for using these languages in our projects!
Feel free to start the discussion early by posting your plans, progress, thoughts, and ideas in the discussion thread!
Thanks to Colin Freas for getting this club organized and underway!