Taking Charge of my Mornings, One Book at a Time

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It’s been a little over two weeks since I graduated General Assembly’s remote Web Development program. It was three months of intense studying and applying concepts to applications we built from scratch so when the program was done, I took a much needed break and spent time with my family.  Now that my schedule has opened up, I’m trying to pick up the momentum by continuing to learn. First thing I do every morning is read for an hour.

My husband already had a collection of tech books that are valuable for a newbie like me so I lined up five to get started.

  1.   My current reading list:

 

2.  What is my process for reading them:

Some of books are essentially for refreshing my memory while also picking up on any nuggets of gold that I may have missed. Books like “Smashing WordPress” might be read cover to cover, but before I start with any book, I always peruse the table of contents to at least prepare myself for what concepts will be discussed and whether the book should be read fully or just focus on certain chapters. If the book doesn’t need to be a full read, then I will mark the chapters I do want to read fully and concepts in other chapters that I want to focus on as well. I don’t want to spend too much time reading anecdotes and examples of concepts that I do understand and reserve that time to really examine the concepts I haven’t fully grasped yet.

3.  How do I plan to solidify the concepts in the books?

Since I pre-selected a list of books to dive into, I also made note of which projects I have in my Github repository that could benefit from what I learn. For example, I created a company wiki app as my second project and one area that needs improvement is the styling. It’s really REALLY plain. I made a note to remind myself to take notes of tidbits I could immediately apply to my company wiki app. This will help solidify my understanding of what I’m reading while also polishing my existing projects.

Well I already did my one hour reading session this morning! Now on to some coding practice on codefights.com!