Hacked Off

I think I must be coming down with something. I feel very out of sorts. Only three hours ago I caught myself thinking “I must buy a book on this, it’s actually quite interesting”.

The subject?

Maven. Yes, MAVEN! A build tool! And a bloody hideously over-engineered one, at that!

What’s the matter with me? I never find software technology interesting any more. And builds? Forget it! What the hell is interesting about slapping a bunch of files together into a jar? Nothing!

And what’s all this about buying a book?

I never buy books about software any more. I’ve got shelves full of dusty old Microsoft books – MFC, OLE, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 3.1 – ancient, stone-age rubbish that I just haven’t got round to throwing away. Yet, these are the books that actually stood the test of time – I could count on them being useful for at least a couple of years. Then along came Java and doing things “on Internet time”. No sooner was a book published than the technology underwent a major point upgrade – usually deprecating all the old APIs that you’d just taken the time to learn, when it turned out that the APIs were in fact a load of half-baked old bollocks.

Since then things have gone from bad to worse – even the official websites of supposedly “mature” technologies are full of out-of-date information. So why buy a book?

Can’t beat a good scribble in the margins, that’s what. I like scribbling on my books. And filling them full of Post-It note placeholders.

So. I must be ill. Perhaps it’s Swine Flu, at last?