What I’m Reading

I’ve been reading quite a bit of different material lately; here’s a quick roundup.

As I mentioned last week, I recently finished and reviewed SEO Warrior by John Jerkovic; I’m currently reading books on iPhone application design and Javascript programming, which I hope to finish by the end of the month, and I have one on PHP I’ll be reading after that. I’m currently looking for full-time work, and I’ve always been interested in web development, so I decided to take advantage of whatever free time I have to pick up the skills that are in demand in this area. Thanks go out to O’Reilly for keeping me supplied with good books lately!

FiveThirtyEight has an interesting article, with discussion, about the history of countries cutting spending during a recession. The Baltic states, for example, slashed spending immediately after the credit bubble popped in 2008, and have since suffered the deepest recessions in Europe. China, on the other hand, increased government spending with a massive (relatively the world’s largest, although smaller than America’s in absolute dollar terms) that went towards infrastructure (as I’ve argued that most of ours should have); as a result, not only is the country being upgraded, but wages are actually increasing.  In fact, China’s economy grew by 8.7% in 2009.

I’m currently contributing five articles per month to BrightHub, mostly on the topics of college and graduate school (actually, all of my articles are in those two areas right now, but I’ll also be writing on family friendly games and web development). So far my most popular article by far is the one on choosing a PhD thesis topic, though  the one on PhD requirements is a strong second. Occasionally I’ll just browse through the articles and see if I find anything interesting. Today I ran across this cute Sunday School lesson about creation; if I still taught Sunday School I could totally see doing something like this.

Next week I’ll want to start reading up on the hot deals in Vegas in preparation for the honeymoon; we already got half-price tickets for Cirque,  but there are a number of other shows we’d like to see. I particularly want to see Lance Burton, since I just missed his last show when we were there before and this will apparently be his final season.

6 thoughts on “What I’m Reading”

  1. William, I checked out your review of “SEO Warrior” and was wondering why the site you did the review on was designed to look like the content is in frames.
    But your review does sound like high praise for the book..I might have to give it a read.

    1. Because my fiancée designed the page and she thought it looked good? :-)
      Actually I hadn’t really even noticed that it looked frame-like, haven’t used the darned things in forever.

  2. I’m currently looking for full-time work, and I’ve always been interested in web development, so I decided to take advantage of whatever free time I have to pick up the skills that are in demand in this area.

  3. That was my reasoning as well, Punching. Now I have a full-time job, but I figure it’s still a good idea to keep picking up more skills :-)

  4. As of now, I am reading 3 different books, 1book before bedtime, 1 book in the comfort room and a book in my patio which tackles about online marketing. Though I am doing outsource job on video SEO still there is so much for me to learn about. I just found more than 3 thousand job vacancies on the internet today, might as well practice other task to be skilled in not just one field. There is a vast opportunity here in the internet when it comes to work.

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