Mitel’s corporate library


It’s a quiet Friday afternoon of a four-day week at the top of
August, so it’s pretty quiet at work today. I don’t really have
anything to hack on that I can start, work a couple hours, and
put away for three days, so I found myself wandering down to the
corporate library for the first time since I started here a year
and a half ago.


The library here is pretty small — about six or seven rows of
stacks, half serials and half books, plus a bank of shelves filled
with videotapes, DVDs and CDs for self-directed courses. This makes
the bookshelves small enough to browse, which is how I spent my
afternoon.


They’ve got a decent selection of books on operating systems,
programming languages, programming techniques, math, electrical
engineering, telephony, networking, business, law and economics,
so I’m a pretty happy camper.


Picked up McKusick’s The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX
Operating System
and Stevens’ Unix Network Programming
today. (Wanted Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment
but they didn’t have it.)


Later, plan on picking up Advanced Perl Programming, Steele’s
Common Lisp, Stevens’s TCP Illustrated, Schneier’s
Applied Cryptography, and a whole bunch more I’ve already
forgotten.


On one hand I’m going “yay, wow, free useful books to borrow and
learn from” — but then I realize that’s exactly how it’s supposed
to work! So I’m still going “Yay, wow, free useful books to borrow
and learn from”. Candice is going back to school in the
fall and will thus need time in the evenings to work on schoolwork,
so I plan on taking the same time and getting up to speed in a bunch
of the practical bits I missed when I switched out of CS and into
economics. First goals are to get fluent in C again and to be able
to understand Unix internals on a medium-high level.


Other suggestions for reading are appreciated. (I’ve also got SICP
at home and might start attacking it too.)


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