[Author's note 2015-12-18: I returned here after nine years to post the picture of the book. It was more trouble than the book was worth, but you rarely find that out until you get so far into the material you can't take the book back. Besides, you are "supposed to know" how to use the code on the Internet once they teach you the commands. Real life does not work like that. To this day, the only thing I can program on the Internet is HTML.
Anyway, here is the picture of this useless book. I could pass any test on how to write this code, but that is very rarely the reason anybody wants to learn code. They want to be able to do something with it. Yet this book never says a word about how to use that code on the Internet. Like it is some kind of secret. I have repeatedly run into this kind of nonsense every time I approached the Internet. There is always some expensive part left out that they want you to go through them first.
The big event of the day was buying a book which won’t seem so ho-hum if you are the type interested in the psychological outcomes of early decisions. The majority of the day was again in the shop taking care of the backlog of network problems. It is too bad they don’t make a network you can set up and leave alone forever. Yes, that includes Linux, which started off great, then slowed down and finally quit working altogether. On three different computers without any outside help. (Sorry, Torvald, you will have to do far, far better than that, regardless of what the problem was.)
Operationally, Linux amounted to trading one set of problems for another. It was a quiet day and I took an after-dark bicycle trip to Border’s to buy a book on PHP and MySQL. The reasons for this book are what some might find revealing. It is because, although I can program, I have never programmed for a living. I do not regret studying programming because it has lent a framework to my approach to almost every aspect of my work life, even in seemingly unrelated fields.
Watch, I mean, I don’t just grab a guitar and start banging out chords. I have a complete one-year plan for the band right down to the set timings before we even get that first gig. I know this planning is necessary, but the last thing I would consider is to hire a manager. Managers are people persons and they would mess things up. That is, I suggest they would go out and actually seek situations where the non-functional parts of the job become so terribly important. It is doubly sickening, because such baloney only works when the other party also has a manager. I think, however, that it is more interesting to tell you about why I have never programmed. In a nutshell, social reasons.
When I was growing up, any type of structure to any thinking was nothing but trouble, both in my family and in the small towns we lived in. You see, any type of organization meant a basis for comparison and they did not like that. In a city, they could melt into droves of other do-nothings, and in the end, most of them wound up doing exactly that. When you live in a town of one thousand people, anything productive would make such people look bad.
Don’t quit, I’m getting to how this relates. When I first studied computers, I was fascinated by the logical organization of making things work right. Unfortunately for me, that is not all there is to programming. First of all, I could not afford to live anywhere that hired programmers until I was over 25, and by then, you know what happens to your plans. I had to keep working at the wrong thing because I was in debt. I kept dabbling at programming and each time I considered jumping back in, I did not like what I saw.
Here’s the explanation. I can write code. What I cannot do is take that code, put it on a computer and sell a working system. Those last two parts did not interest me although I have some definite ideas of how these should not be done. To me, computer administration and marketing jobs are contrived and not needed. Don’t misunderstand me, something is needed, just not those positions as they exist. They are outdated concepts plugged into the computer era.
These jobs are done by people who think selling software and tractors needs pushy sales types and plenty of hype. This is the social aspect I mentioned, and yes, I will give you the details. How can I say this? Those two fields tend to attract the kind of people I do not like because of my small town upbringing. Where I want to program with structure, they want changes and deadlines and sales quotas, generally anything that can blur both the start and finish lines. I estimate more than half of them do it so that they can appear to come to the rescue and half the remaining projects collapsed from their bureaucratic interference. Count for yourself how many good computer ideas you once heard of that seemed to evaporate.
Every programming job I ever looked at had this type of bureaucracy in place. A supervisor that was constantly going to meetings and coming up with half-crocked ideas that changed the premise and had one thing in common: the changes they favor are difficult to quantify. Or salesmen that constantly made promises to the customers and established unworkable deadlines, then complained that you missed them. Is it starting to sound familiar? Every programmer in existence can tell you horror stories about royal screw-ups caused by “computer” administrators and marketers who really, when the bull is stripped away, know squat about computers.
Oh yes, there have been times I was tempted to make the leap, but I don’t personally require any supervisors or managers. I believe that most programming would progress faster and better without them. Managers and marketers are only in the computer field because they managed to wheedle their way in where they were not wanted. They see a group of people and go crazy until it becomes departmentalized with and managed, except there was nothing wrong with it before. It is some height of hypocrisy when non-programmers are put in charge of programmers, much more so than any other line of work I can imagine. The situation goes to worse, because such supervisors know they are intellectual inferiors and are constantly cooking up situations to disguise that fact.
“Why, if I had not stepped in and fired George, he would have put the red button on the left without management approval!”
If I could find a computer project with no supervisors, or supervisors relegated away from meddling, I might think it over. This brings me to the book. It is a book about how to get the system operational on the Internet. I can already program but I don’t know what to do with the code once I’m done. The people I’ve tried to team with instantly stuck their noses where they didn’t belong, like they had some right to do so. Thus, I must write the code myself. Trust me, such projects are self-managing. As far as the marketing? Look on the Internet.
Most things that got big had nothing to do with the hordes of salesmen that came on board later in the game. The successes were small, good ideas that exploded. I have no shortage of small good ideas. I’m tired of hearing about some “new” thing I thought of years before but didn’t know it hadn’t been done. My incentive to learn it is to prevent having to get someone in at the last minute to twist a couple of knobs and try to take all the credit for making it work. I have just heard far too many speeches from managers who speak as if what they did was as important as the actual work. Not when it comes to computers, pal.
I would have done better if I’d learned how to compile the code and things like putting it on a web server. Right now, I don’t even know how to check if a given web server will allow the code to be uploaded. Oddly, although these appear to be computer issues, they have nothing to do with programming or coding. Check with me regularly for a week or two.
[Author's note 2019: this type of book has taken over most of the computer market for manuals. Six hundred pages with the first three or four chapters drastically over-written, but the remainder of the book has not even been proof-read. The scam is to sell you the book and get you to keep it beyond the return period. I have a shelf of them. The rip-off is that they take advantage of the fact most people will never read beyond three chapters. I've dubbed it "The MicroSoft format".
In the end, I never was able to find a book that taught me how to code properly on the Internet. And I lost interest.]
