I think Manning/NoStarch/Pragmatic generally have good quality books, but O'Reilly is not too far behind. They just publish a lot many books, so some are bound to be mediocre and some of them absolute gems.
I really like the wiby.me version of this. It displays results only from early web style pages; a great throwback to an era where not everything was "corporate".
I use Personal Knowbase, a small Shareware era program. It has minor annoyances but does what it says on the tin. It's fast, minimal and allows narrowing down to related notes in a jiffy. The makers update it slowly though.
This is a massive achievement. Being able to run a modern browser and an Office Suite makes it a viable desktop alternative in the coming future. I'm happy to see variety in the desktop OS space once again!
Learning Lisp, more specifically Scheme. I became curious about it after reading ESR's "How to Become a Hacker". When homoiconicity and other Lisp goodies gradually permeated my brain, the computing world seemed different.
I saw every config file differently, trying to see how the lines between config and code blurred. Method abstractions and bottom up design became much easier. I appreciated all those prefix-evaluation assignments in college. I found a new respect for languages with good REPL's. And finally, it opened my eyes to computing history, where I discovered newer is not always better. The elders of old really got many things right.
This is why you should always create something, even if you think it will never be accepted by a large audience. It is worth it for the journey itself.
Reading this post made me wish I had spent more time with 'gcj'. Though in all honesty I know I gave up on it because I didn't want to go the tougher way - the the normal JDK was just there. Creation is beautiful, and its ending bittersweet for the creator and the witnesses.
Let me take this opportunity to thank you for your fantastic editor. It is bloody fantastic and I'm not even an old Wordstar user who just has to use its keybindings. I truly think you have created an almost perfect, light console editor. Could you please consider adding soft-wraps (only emulated, visible line breaks for long lines but no actual breaks saved)?
With that said, to console newbies - you have to try out 'joe' once. It uses the Unix dev environment fantastically and its not short on features either.
This is fantastic news! Joe is a great editor, thank you Joe Allen.
It has got just the right set of features to be a proper Unix editor that is good at editing and delegating other stuff to other utilities. I love the run shell in this buffer feature. The only thing I wish for is a soft-wrap feature, since I deal with long lines quite a lot.
Rather than a single resource, I would suggest reading the Wikipedia entries of the following: I(D)MS, Ingres, PickOS, Mumps, GT.M, dbm, Datacom and ADABAS. All of them have great historical value.
I consider Guy Steele Jr. to be one of the greatest programmers of all time. And when he praises Stallman that way, you begin to grasp just how brilliant Stallman must be.
Plus 10 hours of Steele and Stallman coding together, what a thing of beauty those 100 lines of pretty-print would be.