perl reading group

[Adam Turoff <ziggy@panix.com>]

Last week, when John was in town, a few of us discussed the Perl Reading
group, which seems to be running out of steam.

Perhaps the meeting schedule is too aggressive; perhaps reading a few
chapters of a perl book isn't *that* condusive to a discussion; perhaps
we're all a wee bit too busy; perhaps the moon is out of phase.

Whatever the reason may be, many people seem interested in the idea of
a reading group.  So, to help keep everything fresh, some of us started
thinking about a new technique - pick a current, fresh programming
text, read it in full and discuss it.  A few titles were mentioned:

	The Practice of Programming (Kernighan and Pike; ISBN 020161586X)
	Extreme Programming Explained (Beck; ISBN 0201616416)
	The Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt and Thomas; ISBN 020161622X)

(Bookpool is offering each of these books for ~20% off; extreme programming
is 30% off at Amazon.)

Each of these books talks about programming as a craft, discusses common 
pitfalls and techniques to improve everyday code.  Each of these books is
in the 200-300pp range.  I think it would be a worthwhile goal to read
one of these books and discuss it in its entirety together (say 1/31/00). 

[mjd suggested making a bulk purchase if enough people were interested 
in one of these books.]

What do you think?  Do any of these books look particularly interesting?

-- Adam  

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