First of all, finally I am starting blogging, after seeing my friends doing that months ago! Setting it up with the default theme of Jekyll is relatively easy. And I am pretty satisfied with this simplistic style, unlike my friend Colin who has been tweaking with themes a whole day with no success.

It has been more than one year since last time I browsed over bookshelves in a large bookstore, and picked up interesting stuff to read. The Computer Science & Engineering zone was the first I visited, as usual. I was planning to find some technical handbooks about complex user interface implementation on iOS and basics of building web data servers. There are of course a variety of them, distributed in much more diverse and detailed categories than I imagined before, but most of them turn out to be of little avail.

While waiting for the serendipity the whole morning, I came to understand that my primary knowledge and experience regarding practical computer science & software engineering come from two sources: beginners’ step-by-step tutorials based on examples, and up-to-date official documentation of a language/platform’s features and usage. The first one is extremely useful when I am exposed to a completely new language. I can quickly set up the environments and get a first glimpse of the platform by implementing an example from scratch. Then after some explorations, I am ready for the official docs. They are systematic and highly-organized, and not that difficult to understand given some initial project experiences. More importantly, all of them are free and instantly available on the Internet.

After taking advantages of these two resources since college, I am not used to some of these technical publications with messed up materials. The example-driven books contain plenty of redundant stuff, while other more advanced handbooks are rarely up-to-date. However, I am not expressing dissatisfaction toward the authors and publications of these printed resources; my early knowledge of programming and computer architecture come from them anyway. There are also a bunch of classic discussing language features. It is just that the pros of Internet is making the cons of printed books more obvious. This trip to the largest bookstore in Beijing is more like an exploration of future trends in technology and academics. By having access to all books in stack, I get a glimpse of what platforms are popular right now, and which may be the prevalence in the near future.

Some categories that I briefly visited today

  1. Computer science
    • Mobile development: iOS, Android
    • Mobile UI design patterns
    • Websites & Backend/Web related: HTML 5 + CSS, Javascript/Node.js, AngularJS, Perl, jQuery
    • Databases: mySQL, etc.
    • Networks & Hacking
    • Embedded systems: ARM, Arduino
  2. Automobile Engineering, Railway Engineering (pretty interested in cars, trains and planes, but these college textbook-like stuff are too professional…)
  3. English/Spanish language & Linguistics (so familiar to see new versions of Barron/Princeton SAT prep books again… Most linguistics theories are closely related to sociology. Thinking about a book covering the entire time span of American history, but not too long to read.)
  4. Chinese literature (time to practice Chinese handwriting!)
  5. Military technology

In a nutshell, 北京图书大厦还是不错的!(Beijing Bookstore is still awesome!)