perlmeditation sundialsvc4 What do you read, when you’re on the plane or waiting for a backup to finish or whatever the else you do?   I mean, besides “The Camel Book?”   Stuff that really gets you thinking, either about the business we are in, or the businesses we work for? May I suggest a few, to start? The Long Tail, by Chis Anderson ([http://www.amazon.com/Long-Tail-Future-Business-Selling/dp/B001Q9E9F6]).   The tag line of this book is “Why the future of business is selling less of more.”   Extending this idea, say, to websites, this might explain why, even though there are bigger and bigger “brand-name” sites, there are also more sites out there than ever before.   I’m starting on my third re-reading of this one ... Managing the Mechanism, by Vince North ([http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Mechanism-Software-Successfully-ebook/dp/B00ANYTJZA]), an interesting apparently Kindle-only take that basically says that the reason why software is so hard to manage, is that software’s so different.   Pleasantly little methodology-bashing.   He takes the position that software is a mechanism, always doing whatever it does under its own pre-programmed direction, and that most software projects fail due to project management approaches which do not take the implications of this into account.   (A thought-provoking idea ...) How to Build Your Own Website for Free, by Charlie Morelli ([http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Mobile-Site-Less/dp/1479262781]).   Okay, so I like “Kindle freebies,” but lately I have gathered quite a few books that make this point in various ways, – and frankly, they all are beginning to scare me a little.   I mean, you really can do a lot of the stuff that businesses actually want, including mobile-app stuff, for free now.   Even though there will always be a demand for heavy-hitting back-end coding, like we are all used to doing, I perceive a sharp reduction in the notion that a web-site and the programming that used to go into it is still worth tens of thousands of dollars.   I openly fear that there is developing in our business an over-supply of workers that coincides with a sharp reduction(!) in demand. Anyway, there’s three.   Any good ones from you that you think we programmer-types all should be reading on these cold winter nights?   What do you think of what they said?