Readit NewsOS: Any Unix/Linux will do
Source/Version Control: Whatever is used where I have to do some work
Editors: vi(m), no plugins
At the end of the day, I really only need some ssh, screen, a halfway decent shell, any versioning and a vi.
Also: Pen and paper to take notes and ANY simple GUI to run a browser is appreciated.
If I can have it, I'll take it all in UTF-8, please. :)
Healthy skepticism is beneficial, but I've seen teams paralyzed because one member has perfected the technique of raising unanswerable or irrelevant objections, often seemingly to present the appearance of being the smartest guy in the room.
I like working with them and having at least one on the team, because they're a great addition to the "naive optimist" or the "carefree hacker-fixer" who always see the solution around the corner - in a couple of minutes of course. ;)
And: There's a lot of tech scenarios where being overly careful and actually seeing the impending technical doom in every corner is an advantage.
Similar to the pedantry you get by the human robot, Cassandras have their place - and good management and coworkers know exactly where and how to take them.
* "Zen and the Brain" (written by a meditation practising neurologist)
* "The Buddha Brain" (about the neurological/physiological background of a couple of buddhist principles)
That's not really "the way forward", that's actually quite back to the roots. :)
An interface that e.g. makes me 'escape' half of my input because its designers think their special use of characters must take precedence over all user input is a bad interface.
In Perl, it's called quotemeta (qw, qq and family, too), in Python and Ruby it's .escape... and there's always \Q ... \E to use...
I'm sure others have similar methods/functions.
The book doesn't just teach you regex, but the why, how AND the dialects. It gives you an overview over different tools and programming languages and their regex-related functions and methods.
On top, it contains a ton of examples, is very well written (considering the insanely dry and difficult to typeset subject :) and is very polished (I think it's in the 3rd edition by now..)
If you just google or experiment on regex, you usally get bad regex, badly crafted regex, brittle regex and make every single mistake the book prevents you from doing.
It's really one of the most worthwhile books of reading through - it's also an excellent handbook to look things up.
Remember that a lot of commandline tools take in regex too - grep, sed, awk, you name it - it's not just for use in programming languages.
Your favorite editor has regex too.
I simple don't know how people can live without; I'm using regex practically every day.
P.S.: And _after_ reading the book, you will understand why people yell at you when you parse HTML with regex but you will know how to do it anyways and at least not completely badly. ;)
P.P.S: And here's the canonical post to BUT OF COURSE you can parse HTML with regex from stackoverflow.. :) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4231382/regular-expressio...
You will profit from it for the rest of your career.
(There's also a Regex short reference and a Regex cookbook by O'Reilly...)
Go on to reading the Toyota management style in itself, there's a couple of books about it, that's what many IT techiques are getting their ideas from.
It's mostly about finding your values so to speak and pinpoint what you really think makes up a good software development company - maybe your focus will be on organization, maybe on other things, so get an overview first.
These two articles are hopefully also an interesting nudge to think about many things:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_u...
http://alistair.cockburn.us/Characterizing+people+as+non-lin...
O'Reilly has a very interesting book with analysis which practices actually work and why/how - sadly I also forget the title. There's for example a chapter about when and why pair programming works and when and why not.
Also, just watch carefully and learn to notice "good organization" - happens in surprising corners and niches and try to see WHY it's good.