I have an occasional weakness: every now and again, when I find myself at a bookstore and am not worried about money, I will buy a computer book. Principally, these books tend to be about programming in Cocoa, the native framework of my operating system of choice.
This is perhaps a little perverse, since I don’t — as a general rule — program. I certainly don’t program well. (While I’m reasonably competant in a handful of formatting languages, those aren’t really the same thing. Anyone who uses the phrase “HTML programming” probably Does Not Know what they are Talking About.) And really, I don’t need to program. I got out of that racket almost seven years ago.
But I still feel that, somehow, I should be able to program. I think part of it’s a fascination with the idea of a programming language as a mode of expression. Mostly, though, it’s probably that as an educated math geek at the tail end of Generation X™, I feel that some ability with computers is expected of me. I design algorithms; I should be able to implement them myself.
So I go and buy the books, and often try to read them, and then my actual work starts making demands on my analytical brain, which decouples from the part that sees reading as a default idle activity. And the book goes on a shelf (eventually, sometimes languishing in a satchel or my trunk, or occasionally on the floor someplace) and gets glanced at now and again. And, several months after that, I go and buy a new book.