New books

Back in the grind.  Work seems to be moving along as normal, though craziness is only moderate due to having a trainer in town to work with new equipment.  Though I am beginning to understand why we break (almost) everything we touch.  As a company, we have a bad habit of knowing how to do things, and then pushing and pushing until we find the outer boundary of what is capable.  So we break software like there is no tomorrow.  Either that, or we let way too many salesmen sell us things.  But I digress.

I’ll probably finish The Practice of System and Network Administration this week, so I need to dig through my collection and find another book.  Or if not this week, sometime next week.  I think I only have 150 or so pages, and many of those fit in the category of appendices.  Ok, flipping through I think I’ll read the appendices.  And I’ve only got about 70 pages left.  So then that begs the question of where I think I should go next with my studies. 

I have several options, considering the stack of books at my repository.  Those directions include servers, operating systems, security, networking, or service management.  If I was to go towards servers, it would be Windows Server 2008.  Operating systems would be something on Windows 7.  Security gets a bit deeper, as there are books on COMPTIA Security+ and others.  Networking basically involves a bunch of Cisco stuff and going back to finally passing the CCNA.   If I went services, I’d be reading stuff like ITIL. 

Just putting all this on paper leads me to believe I have another option to look into, and the more I think about it the more I like the idea.   I know I’ve talked about this before, but the action I put into this was pretty pathetic.  All I did was listen to a podcast, and I never even finished the series of podcasts.   But anyways, the idea is to finish that book and quit trying to learn more information until I’ve better learned how to learn and how to retain the information read.  I think this by Joshua Foer was one thing I was thinking about.  The only problem with the idea there is that I need to pay off the library what I owe them.