So this year so far I’ve been setting myself a goal of reading a lot more general purpose computing books rather than the programming specific ones I’ve been reading in my work/education up to now. It’s been a slow start, generally I try and read a normal fiction/science fiction book in between, and unfortunately I’ve chosen Peter F Hamilton’s Nights Dawn trilogy which is full of monster books about 1200 pages long a piece, so that’s eaten up a chunk. However I’ve managed to get through The Pragmatic Programmer, Programming Ruby (or the pick axe as it’s known) and I’m just about to move on to The Inmates are Running the Asylum. I know (just by reading the forewords) there are a lot of books out there I should have read, but I just never saw them as something. It’s mainly been the writing of Jeff Atwood, that’s made me realize I’ve missed a huge amount off my education [Code complete will be next on my list].
Having said that I owe a lot to SQS and my work there that reading The Pragmatic Programmer was not an eye opener in that I wasn’t aware and agreeing with the ideas, but was a shock somewhat with the realization that there was a need to tell people about it, wasn’t everyone doing it? It’s led me to a little bit of a revelation that I’m not that normal 
To all my coder friends, stop it. become a developer, become and Architect of software, open your eyes to those around you, and I can’t suggest a better place to start than Jeff and Coding Horror
