Meh @reading (but Yay to reading on the iPod)

I can't be the only programmer who finds reading a chore? And what about those 5-billion page programming tomes? Am I the only one who never finishes those?

It happens to be that I just found something about reading that totally rocks: Reading on the iPhone/iPod Touch is totally different (better different). HA! I bet you didn't know I was going to say that (well if you read the title of this post you probably did.. that was totally a spoiler).

Now it seems that I am finding I actually enjoy reading again (did I just write that?). I ended up landing a very fetching iPod touch for Christmas which has been having it's battery drained near non-stop since the package was opened. As a curiosity of sorts, I threw a lot of the big name apps onto it, including Kindle for Ipod, and purchased a book I had been eying for a while, Javascript: The Good Parts (Douglas Crockford), to try out the experience of reading on the iPod.

It seems so wrong but I found I actually prefer reading on the iPod. I've read a number of paper books, and I've tried reading eBook/PDFs on the computer, but neither of them really jump out at me. But the iPod... the iPod I like.

The reason for this, I suspect, is that reading on the iPod is not intimidating. The screen only shows 2 paragraphs at a time. I don't need to be worried about the rest of the book, I'm only looking at these 2 paragraphs. What I think this does for me is it allows me to read the book without feeling like I have to rush to get to the end.

My wife thinks it's silly, but whatever -- I'm already on my 2nd book.... Real World Haskell (Donald Stewart). Oooooh yes, it's Haskell time! Expect some really weirded out blog posts from me in the future about functional programming.