Recently I’ve been asking myself, what step I should take next in my career path. While I was glancing through the 200+ topics from the feed aggregators on Google Reader, this blog entry from Peter Bell caught my eye. He highly recommended this book, which can be purchased as a PDF for US$12.50, so I bought it and gave it read.
Before I purchased the book, I was hoping that I can get some great insights on my next career move, but I think the book fell short of my expectation.
The first chapter or two was okay. It explains what are jellyfish, developers who only learn and use what’re needed in projects at work, and what are sharks, developers who learn technologies outside of work. It encourages the readers to be more like sharks.
Then it has a few chapters on improving the writing and public speaking skills, which I did not expect to find on a book about career. It encourages one to blog and speak at local user group, and then write a book or speak at a conference later.
I found myself already near the end of the book before I expected. The book ends with several “been there, done that” software developers talking about how their career lives were formed and things that they have learned. I think they are quite valuable, but many of them have already been quoted throughout the first few chapters, reading them again seems repetitive.
Overall, I think it is an easy read, but it was just okay in terms of the quality and quantity of the original content. Fortunately, it was not expensive. :)
