A Book Club Rebooted ?!?!

This month, my local "Geeky Book Club," rebooted.

I thought about calling it a facelift, but the club was never in need of a facelift. It really just needed a little bit more modernization. It's a long-running book club! About two decades, standing,  -- or, rather -- sitting, from what I can tell.

Officially, it used to be called the LAJUG Study Group.  The Web Page for this monicker still sits there -- for a while, at least. But now, the links on this page point to the newly rebooted:

DevTalk LA

It's not merely a name change, or a face lift. The group has shifted from being focused on Java to a broader range of technology interests. It was natural, almost imperceptible shift, which you can see for yourself by perusing the extensive list of  past books:

Past Books Covered Before I Joined:

• Design Patterns Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides
• Refactoring by Martin Fowler
• Concurrent Programming in Java Design Principles and Patterns by Doug Lea
• Java 2 Performance and Idiom Guide by Craig Larman and Rhett Guthrie
• Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn
• Bitter Java by Bruce Tate
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler 
• Problem Frames by Michael Jackson
• J2EE AntiPatterns by Bill Dudney, Scott W. Thomas, David Osborne, and Bob Kiel
• Documenting Software Architectures: Views and Beyond by Paul Clements, Felix Bachmann, Len Bass, David Garlan, James Ivers, Reed Little, Robert Nord, and Judith Stafford
• Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas 
• Refactoring to Patterns by Joshua Keriesky
• Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB by Rod Johnson and Juergen Hoeller
• Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans
• Agile Software Development Ecosystems by Jim HighSmith
• Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity by Joel Spolsky
• Effective Java Programming Language Guide by Joshua Bloch
• Effective Enterprise Java by Ted Neward
• Aspect-Oriented Software Development by Robert E. Filman
• Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea
• Head First Design Patterns by Elisabeth & Eric Freeman, Bert Bates & Kathy Sierra
• Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck
• Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Apps by Mike Clark
• Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck
• Java Generics and Collections by Maurice Naftalin and Philip Wadler
• Programming Groovy by Venkat Subramaniam
• Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
• Effective Java, 2nd edition by Joshua Bloch
• Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe
• Java Persistence with Hibernate by Christian Bauer and Gavin King 

I joined the group shortly after returning to my birthplace, here in Sunny Silicon Beach. That put me on the list at this point:

Books Covered During My Participation:

• Programming the Semantic Web by Toby Segaran, Colin Evans, and Jamie Taylor
• Coders at Work by Peter Seibel
• Advanced SQL Programming Forth Edition by Joe Celko 
• Seven Languages Seven Weeks by Bruce A Tate
• Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hung
• Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Restful Web Services by Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby and David Heinemeier Hansson
• Java Performance by Charlie Hunt & Binu John
• The Cucumber Book: Behaviour-Driven Development for Testers and Developers (Pragmatic Programmers) by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesoy
• Data and Reality: A Timeless Perspective on Perceiving and Managing Information in Our Imprecise World, 3rd Edition by William Kent and Steve Hoberman

Next Book Upcoming

• About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper 

One can easily see that the focus shifted almost exactly when I arrived. We covered the Semantic Web, Coder Stories, SQL, 7 different languages, Thinking, XP, Psychology!!!, REST, Cucumber, and Database Modelling problems. Only one book, on Java Performance was directly about Java!!! 

So, the name change merely reflects the present-day reality ... the changes that have taken effect ... we now have a wonderful discussion-based book club for developers in the local Los Angeles area. Please come and join us ...

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO