Here’s a list of books I have in a pile next to my bed, which I’m either reading, have read, or am planning to read:

Non-technical:

1. ‘Hackers and Painters‘ by Paul Graham.
2. ‘Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers‘ by Geoffrey A. Moore. (I wanted to know what a disruptive product is… yes, this was an impulse buy on Amazon.)
3. ‘Subject to Change‘ by Adaptive Path (* partial review).

Technical:

1. ‘Flash CS3 for Designers‘ by Tom Green and David Stiller. I won/inherited this book at a Flash Brighton event over half a year ago.
2. ‘CSS Mastery‘ by Andy Budd et al.
3. ‘Bulletproof Web Design‘ by Dan Cederholm.
4. ‘About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design‘ by Alan Cooper.
5. ‘Designing Interactions‘ by Bill Moggridge. It’s extremely inspiring to learn about the history of the Graphical User Interface at Xerox PARC (among everything else in this book).

These lists should give you an insight into what’s on my mind right now.

Overall, I’m focusing on learning about web standards, which I have finally accepted are quite important. So, a new ambition is to write clear, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. I’m getting there. Learning to write CSS/XHTML that is also standards compliant helps me to understand how it works, which is the underlying motivation. That is what it is about for me: expanding the parameters of what I am able to do with CSS/XHTML.

Reading books about CSS, to my genuine surprise, has taught me a lot – I was skeptical that they’d teach me more than pure tinkering could. I’ve always known what good website design looked like, but I never had sufficient respect for the underlying code – even if I told myself I did. It’s a good feeling to actually understand what the code is doing, or to begin to understand.

In addition to learning CSS/XHTML, I’m playing tentatively with Processing, mainly to sate my curiosity. After tiptoeing around the programming pool for years, I’m now dipping a toe in… and running off screaming. But then coming back to it, with euphoria, grit, and determination! And why not?

It’s hard for me to avoid or ignore programming, as I work for a software company. I design interfaces for mobile software. One of my coworkers suggested I start learning Objective-C, which I just might. I liked this quotation from Paul Graham, which made the idea much more appealing to me:

“It’s odd that people think of programming as precise and methodical. Computers are precise and methodical. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh.”