@Davïd I actually no immediate plans to own a print copy. On sale in Accordance it ended up being about half the price, and it ends up overall a little more convenient for my purposes (portable, searchable, linked to the text! - I'm sure I've lost something by this sort of cheating in lexicons - knowing the order of the alphabet, for instance...), although I like real books.
@Susan There's no denying the convenience of electronic editions. A shame it's got so many mistakes! A quick check of Abebooks shows the printed book is much more expensive than I thought!
We've been talking a lot about the efficacy of community self-evaluations lately, both internally on the Community Team and out in the open on meta. Lots of ideas were tossed around, but the underlying theme of these discussions has been that site self-evaluations are not useful in their current ...
@Susan Hurrah! (IMO, of course.) Effort-to-insight ratio way too poor for my tastes. There are some good ideas in that Q&A which give realistic and helpful ways forward, it seems to me.
@PaulVargas First time I've stopped by (only started on this site in general about two weeks ago. :) To answer your question, yes and no. I originally went to school for Computer Science, but dropped out to pursue my business aspirations (running a bookstore). I returned to school some years later to get an Actuarial degree (to better support my family). I now work at an insurance company, and have an actuarial job title, yet somehow I ended up in a position that is mostly technical work.
So, I spend a lot of my time programming (and also program for my own fun) or otherwise doing technical computer work, but I'm not a professional programmer.
@PaulVargas At work, I deal primarily with VBA as most of our work involves Excel spreadsheets and in a couple cases Access databases. We also have a web app written in ASP with a bit of Javascript that I maintain. In my own projects, my preferred language is Perl due to its excellent text parsing. I have also recently written an Android app for a friend; Android uses a Java-based language.
@Davïd @Susan Certainly. Upvotes are hard to come by on this SE, so any answers getting 20 upvotes is quite a rare accomplishment.