What I'm Reading - 2010-09-24

Where Good Ideas Come From It’s more watching than reading, but whatever. There are words in there! Storyselling 101 It’s a marketing piece, sure, but it applies to everything you do. The most compelling way to educate is to do it with a story. People identify with and engage in stories. Ever watch a good movie and end up on the edge of your seat for most of the movie? That’s engagement. Engage your readers with a story. 10 Hadoop-able Problems (a summary) WTF would you want to use Hadoopfor? Here are ten problems you could use Hadoop to solve. 14 Ways To Have Fun Coding Ruby Even though it says it’s all about Ruby, these are great ways you can remind yourself that writing software is something that should be fun, not a chore. If you’ve always thought writing software was a chore, you should quit your job and sell shoes. Now. Read Ruby A free book that covers Ruby 1.9. It’s still an early draft, but it’s a free learning resource that you can read and contribute to. The author is releasing the book under a Creative Commons license and the code is up ongithub so you can contribute back to the project. Relational Database Design and the Optimizers I haven’t read this book yet, but I think it should be on everyone’s reading list.