Study the Classics

The second pattern for this week Apprenticeship Pattern is “Study the Classics”. I think this one is pretty straight forward, as it states on point that reading and learning what is in the past is as essential as doing so with documents and books in the current generation, as it would allow ourselves to expose to problems that we might rarely see at the moment.

The patterns start out with an extremely interesting problem that a lot of more experienced people in the field would likely to reference a concept from books and area that we might have now idea it exists, but they expect us to know it already, like any other self-respecting software developers. I have not experienced anything thing like this while working as an intern, but I can imagine that it does happens a lot to new developers in the field. The author explains the solution in a very simple way, which is to admit your ignorance, and ask about the concept, how it works, where do they reference it from and add it to our own reading list. For people like me who has not experienced a situation like that to get a title to read, when picking out books to read, the author recommended us to look at how out of dated it is comparing to the continuously evolving technologies that we have right now to make sure that we are reading the one needed for our on need in the current state of technology development. I think that does not really mean that we can ignore all of the books that are written decades ago as it might contains a lot of information that can even serve until today, still however, they should not be on our top priority list. It is best to have a mix between classics and modern to have a feel of what is the differences, what is improved, what is still remains, and that is the best way to avoid making the same mistakes and have a better referencing stand point when putting out our opinion to the team.

In my opinion, this pattern does not necessary to contain the most useful information to choose the best book out there to read. I think if the author put out some of the examples to make comparison, like a book about Python 2 and another one about Python 3, it should make a clear distinction in the reader’s mind that this pattern is important to keep in mind. With that being said, I think the patter itself is not too informative as much as the other one, but it does have some value to tell the readers that books will always have their value, whether it is old or new, but to prioritize reading the right one, would make one more successful than others