Amazon Kindle: One of the Best Tools in a Technical Pro's Arsenal

As any professional knows, you can't get by in technology without constantly keeping your skills up to date with emergent technologies. Of the various ways to do this, one of the best is to choose some detailed technical books in those fields that are presently of interest. Preferably ones that have been written by people that are actual hands-on developers themselves, rather than those by authors that merely have an academic interest in the subject under discussion. Wrox Press does an excellent line of books called Programmer to Programmer, which are very useful in this regard.

Once you've absorbed the material, and have used the technologies concerned on a few live projects, these books become an excellent source of reference material, which you can refer back to time and time again. If you're anything like me, you'll have a bookshelf at home that looks something like this:

RP's old technical library

The only downside to Wrox books (and any other type of reference manual) is their weight. It's typically handy to have those books that are relevant to the discrete areas you're working in at a given time to hand as you tackle a real project. Given that even a few books combined generally weigh around 2-3kg, that can be a real strain on your back, especially if you're already carrying a laptop and other bits and pieces around too. 

Around about two years ago, I bought an Amazon Kindle, for the express purpose of carrying around these tomes without dislocating my spine. The passive e-ink display of the basic Kindle device is great for reading in bright sunlight:

Physical Kindle Device

And there's a handy little management tool on the Amazon website that allows you to keep your books safe and available at all times, wherever you may be:

Amazon's "Manage Your Kindle" tool

(View full size here)

The battery on a physical Kindle device lasts for a very long time (at least a month of continual use between charges), and the device itself has room for loads and loads of books. There's also a free PC-for-Kindle application that allows you to view the e-books you've purchased on any PC. And for Android users, there's a nifty free Kindle-for-Android app that allows you to view your books on your tablet:

Kindle for Android tablet, Library View

 or on your Android phone:

Kindle for Android phone

  

These latter applications are particularly useful if a book you happen to be using utilises colour to convey meaning:

Colour-Coded Keywords

Coloured Graphics

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However, the best thing about using Kindle as your technical library, which all technical departments should take heed of, is that you need only buy each book once. If you've got a department full of 20 developers (within which there will undoubtedly be a huge overlap of skillsets), it makes sense to buy one copy of each book, and allow each developer access to that library of virtual books via their own PC. An organisation that wants to make effective use of technology will also probably find it profitable to fork out for a few Tablets and physical Kindle devices for taking into meetings. In terms of increased profitability for individual developers, they'll pay for themselves in no time.

Academia: The Internet, You're Doing It Wrong.

There was an interesting article on Radio 4's Today programme yesterday, concerning the way peer-reviewed research journals such as Science and Nature charge British Universities hundreds of millions of pounds each year for access to the scientific research they publish on academics' behalves. In many cases, in a bizarre reversal of the normal economics of the process of publication, these journals also both charge the publishers of the research themselves for the act of publishing, and require those authors to sign away copyright to the journals involved so the originators of the work can't even reproduce their own articles elsewhere (hence the fees – to the publisher, not to the author - when other academics later want to see what's been written by their peers).

The wider piece centred around a new website that's about to be launched, called eLife. The project is being championed by Sir Mark Walport, the director of the Wellcome Trust, and aims to provide a free, centralised place for research to be published instead.

The whole piece got me thinking about how Universities, and for that matter most publicly-funded bodies, don't seem to use information technology at all well, most particularly the web. The apparent benefits of peer-reviewed publications, at least in the eyes of those academics that choose to publish their work through them, is that they allow other academics in their fields an easy way to find and review their research. This apparently enables them to collaborate better and promotes further scientific development. Because, you know, unless publications like Nature et al existed, academic research would be otherwise impossible to publicise, find and share. 

If only there were an effective way to search the internet using some sort of tool – kind of like an engine for searching, if you will – that could enable academics to allow their work to be discovered that way instead? And wouldn't it also be nice if there were some existing, free, centralised, widely-respected encyclopaedia of knowledge, that was editable by anyone, and that was well-indexed by these 'search engines'. In an ideal world we could even make that online encyclopaedia itself searchable in its own right. In such a technological Nirvana, academics of all flavours could easily just publish their own original research on their own blogs, within their own institutions' websites, whenever they liked for little to no cost, retain the copyright themselves, then provide an entry in that centralised encyclopaedia of knowledge containing links to their own independently-published research. That way anyone, including other academics, could then subsequently easily find and develop their ideas.

But no, I can't see us having that sort of technology until at least the next millennium, so I guess Universities will just have to keep handing over millions of their tuition fees and state research funding money to journals that provide a shadow of the above service for a fee instead. And who then also charge anyone that wants to read it too.