Secrets of a Buccaneer-Schoolar by James Marcus Bach

The complete title of the book is Secrets of a Buccaneer-Schoolar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success. The book is not about the testing or even software, but about self-education. However there are a lot of examples from testing area.


Shortly - I really-really liked it. First of all, as we all know, the author dropped high school - me too. So the philosophy about schools and universities is very familiar to me. I want to give this book to all people who make surprised face about that fact in my biography. In my case, I was very successful in middle school (graduated with honors) and people just don't understand why I don't want to get a paper about high education. Answer is actually very simple - because there isn't such profession as tester or even software engineer, there is only IT (which is much wider). So I want to go deeper, not wider. And this book proofs that this is a normal decision (sometimes I wasn't sure about how smart this decision was).


"Perhaps the secret to happiness is finding the games we love to play, instead of learning how to win a games we hate."
The book is full of very bright and simple statements, that I understand intuitively, but was never able to put them in words. So it sorts some thoughts and puts them in right places.


"Intelligence is just a tool. Love is the point."
Great metaphor: you should encourage your mind to wander - like keeping dog on a long leash:

The text itself is very simple, but it's full of weird words - I was looking for definitions in dictionary all the time. And this is actually quite fun, because all these strange words are understandable through context, so the meaning of text is not lost, but English is improved.

In this case I wanted to look up a word in dictionary from explanation itself (unfortunately you can't do that in Kindle)
Sometimes even dictionary didn't know the word. For example, unjammed:

So, I strongly recommend read this book to all testers (actually all people). It makes your mind wider and more open.

One more magic idea that I really liked - "the most wonderful thing I do in my entire life may happen in the next ten seconds."