Keeping Up: My Current Favorite Resources
The central challenge in our profession is keeping up with technology change. Whatever your job, wherever you are in your career, you need to learn lots of new things every year. If you don't, your career is guaranteed to be suboptimal (and probably short).
Along with following the right people on Twitter and reading the trade press, I've come to depend on two subscription services:
Along with following the right people on Twitter and reading the trade press, I've come to depend on two subscription services:
- Safari Books Online: For about the cost of one technical book a month, I now have access to an enormous library of current titles on pretty much every subject. Technical blog posts are useful, but for really understanding something, nothing beats a good book. Everybody in IT should subscribe to this service--it's just great.
- Pluralsight: Live training seminars can be wonderful and inspiring, but they're also expensive and time consuming. Web-based training has taken over much of this market, and Pluralsight appears to be the leader. Their audio-over-slides style is simple and works well, and their library is large and growing. I'm especially impressed with how rapidly they get courses posted on hot new topics. And like Safari, their monthly subscription fee for individuals is about the same as buying one book a month, something that all of us should be doing anyway. I've done a couple of courses for Pluralsight, so I get the service for free, but even if this weren't true, I'd happily be a paying subscriber.