We had a similar program in our company last year where we chose a programming related book and read a few chapters each week and discuss on the points once in a week. It was a great program where we were able to read some amazing books. I acted as a moderator for the books & discussions.
The books that we read were,
Code Complete 2,
The Pragmatic Programmer,
Learning Agile (O'Reilly),
Adaptive Code (Microsoft Press)
Clean Code
Don't make me think
The team seemed to like it in the beginning and unfortunately, over time it became more a chore rather than fun and it didn't continue for a long time. I personally learned a lot from the books & discussions on the books.
It's a bit challenging to scale the idea to the bigger community. However, these are some of my thoughts from my experience on organizing the activity.
Choosing Books:
Let the community choose the books, rather than choosing a book for them. Since Dev.to is a huge community, We could provide a page where we list down the books. There have been several posts in the past on this topic. Posts tagged with #books. Perhaps We could curate the list of books to bring into a limited number, say 10-20 to start with.
Let the people vote books to pick the top 5 books they want to read. It doesn't need to be limited to 5. But a limited set of books increases the focus of the program.
We could start with top 5 books that have more votes/interests, followed by next books in the coming months. Since it's an open community, We should let the people read any other books and start discussions as well.
Give Enough Time:
The time required to finish a chapter depends on the number of pages, the difficulty of the content and of course depends on the reader. Giving enough time to read encourages people and makes the activity as fun to do.
After all, the goal is not to finish reading a book but to learn from the book and from quality discussions by the community.
Think About Cost:
There's a lot of people who like to read books, but the cost of the book could one of the reasons stopping them. So cost should also be a factor when choosing a book.
I would recommend putting a guideline not to share unlicensed versions of PDFs/links, as it's not the right practice. We could add guidelines and possibly moderate comments if needed.
We could use the tag #bookshelf instead of just #books as the main tag to identify the post.
For topics, eg., #cryptography, #Swift
Posts on the individual chapter of the books: Book titles & chapter title perhaps. eg., #DontMakeMeThink, #BillBoardDesign
That reminds me, there is a series of blogs in dev.to on the book Don't Make Me Think.
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It's a great idea!
We had a similar program in our company last year where we chose a programming related book and read a few chapters each week and discuss on the points once in a week. It was a great program where we were able to read some amazing books. I acted as a moderator for the books & discussions.
The books that we read were,
The team seemed to like it in the beginning and unfortunately, over time it became more a chore rather than fun and it didn't continue for a long time. I personally learned a lot from the books & discussions on the books.
It's a bit challenging to scale the idea to the bigger community. However, these are some of my thoughts from my experience on organizing the activity.
Choosing Books:
Give Enough Time:
Think About Cost:
We could use the tag #bookshelf instead of just #books as the main tag to identify the post.
For topics, eg., #cryptography, #Swift
Posts on the individual chapter of the books: Book titles & chapter title perhaps. eg., #DontMakeMeThink, #BillBoardDesign
That reminds me, there is a series of blogs in dev.to on the book Don't Make Me Think.