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At the recommendation of the Wealthy Blogger, I bought the Automatic Millionaire by David Bach (US, Canada), and read it off and on for the past few weekends. It’s not very long but I just didn’t have attention span to finish it all at once. I blame TV.

Seriously, that usually means that the writing isn’t very interesting. That isn’t really true for this book, though. Even though the advice seems simple, I learned a lot about managing money from the book. My parents weren’t very good teachers when it came to money, so a lot of it was new to me. Essentially, Bach says Pay Yourself First and Make It Automatic! I might owe him a few bucks mentioning that, since he repeats those phrases so often I suspect they’re trademarked. He has a few other pointers, but it’s mostly centered around making it all automatic so even those who suck at saving can do it.

So what was the problem? I think it was the repetition. Pay Yourself First! Make It Automatic! Every chapter. Gawd! If he was on TV, it would have be very informercially (that’s the technical term). Now that I consider it, the text is very conversational, almost as if he transcribed one of his seminars. The repetitive catch phrases would probably work if I saw him live, but as book, it doesn’t really work. Granted, a literary masterpiece should not be sought in personal finance; the advice, the important part, is very good and essential if you suck at saving or charge everything on the plastic. Recommended.

P.S. Yay! 100th post. A significant milestone since I suck at posting frequently. More significant than a year blogging, which passed last week.

Chris Sells is asking his Windows Forms Programming Readership what he should do about the 2nd edition.

It got me thinking about what I like and dislike about technology books. I remember, when I first started out in Computer Science (~2001), walking into the computer section at my local giant bookstore, looking for books about how to design applications, design classes, how to program effectively, how should technology X be used effectively. I wanted to know what was important and what wasn’t. What did the pros do?

Well, I was disappointed with what I had to choose from. My choices were thick, heavy books at an outrageous price (damn the exchange rate!) that covered everything about technology X. There weren’t many on the topics that I thought I wanted. Professional C# Programming. Programming Robots with JINI. Essential ASP.NET. How to run a Linux Web Server Farm. Python explained. Now with 1300 pages of real-world sample application code! (I should not have to bother mentioning those Learn-everything-about-programming-in-five-minutes books. Those are beneath my contempt. I’m not talking about those. This guy does though.) Being rather green, I concluded that those books must contain what I want as well as a lot of other stuff that can’t really hurt anyway. So I bought some. I’d maybe look at a few chapters focussed on a particular topic. Then it would go on the bookshelf and stay there to be moved to my next apartment, another reason for detesting the grotesquely huge publications.

Now I’m more experienced with programming and buying computer books. I’ve learned my lesson. I’m wary of anything bigger than a few hundred pages. Those big fatties didn’t contain what I wanted to learn about. Or, if they did, they didn’t cover the topic deep enough, so I was forced to do it myself anyway. They focussed on a lot of how to do something, and not very much on when and why.

One idea Wrox had that I really liked was the Handbook. They were focussed, little books on a particular topic. And I mean particular. I managed to get a few on .NET topics from Code Access Security to Serialization to Scalability. I thought those were great. And that’s what I look for now in a book. Short, sweet and only covers one thing.

Those books are very rare, though, probably not profitable.