I already had a Macbook and an iPod Touch, the latter of which has almost completely taken over regular Email, Twitter and RSS duties, whilst the former is essential for my software development and engineering activities.

We both love reading, but we also live in a small house with limited space for our book collection. Our local library isn’t well stocked with the science fiction genre I favour, and with an Amazon basket of full of books I don’t have space for, it was time to go electronic.

Instapaper is great at making web content more accessible on either of my existing platforms, and I use it regularly, but neither is great for serious reading: the iPod screen is too small for anything other than casual reading; the Macbook is too bulky, warm, slow to start up, and the screen has the wrong aspect ratio.

I wanted something specifically for reading, and this is where the Kindle seemed to fit.

At first the interface seemed pretty awkward to someone used to an Apple touchscreen, but after a week of use I’m getting pretty slick with the five-way control and keyboard. I regularly use searches, highlighting, bookmarking, and I’m sorry to have to admit, the dictionary.

It seamlessly integrates with Amazon, as you might expect, but I particularly like the ability to try a sample any books or magazines you might be considering, I’ve several lined up.

There are loads of classics freely available on the Web from sites like Project Gutenberg. They’re not the kind of thing I’m likely to buy normally, but I’ve already downloaded “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.

As I write this, I’m a quarter of the way through Darwin’s masterwork, I’ve bought and started a series of Alastair Reynolds short stories I’ve had my eye on for months, and I’m even considering a subscription to a Analog magazine through Amazon – one of the samples.

The one fly in the ointment is that I’d have liked to use the Kindle to read some of the many academic papers I’ve been neglecting. However, with only 6 inch screen it’s pushing things too far, not surprising really.

I’ve tried it and the text can be made just about legible, but doing so compromises the usability of the Kindle: you really don’t want to have to scroll. And after all that, the text on a large document is only just big enough to read, so you’re asking for eye strain.

I’ve noticed that the TV is suffering from neglect, a result of the resurgence in reading caused by the Kindle and iPod Touch. I keep asking myself whether this is temporary, novelty driven behaviour, but I suspect it will be permanent.

The first is “The Art of Agile Development” by James Shore and Shane Warden. I’ve been introduced to agile development methods in one of my Open University courses, but this is the first detailed description of the practices adopted by agile teams.

The second tome is “Transcending CSS” by Andy Clarke, which I must confess I was unsure about when I asked for it. I needn’t have worried, this is the best web design book I’ve yet read. I’ve learned a lot about the finer points of CSS positioning and Andy’s semantic approach to mark-up gels well with my interest in the XML in general.

The most exciting common factor concerns the topic of prototyping. It seems to me that approaching the whole application — from the persistence to presentation — with feature targeted development and frequent, early prototyping makes good sense. If nothing else this agile approach fills me with enthusiasm, and that may be half the battle.

I intend to introduce test driven development to my coding. Ruby on Rails and Java make good provision for this within their frameworks. PHP lags these two, and guess which I need to use in my next job? All is not lost though, I’ve discovered a test framework called SimpleTest, which is modelled on JUnit, and I’m going to give it a go.

I’m also investigating build, testing and deployment automation. Java provides the excellent Ant; a tool I’ve used to a limited extent in the past. Ant can turn it’s hand to just about any task that might need automating, but needs Java installed on the server. Unfortunately, this is something a minimal CentOS 5 server installation doesn’t possess, a little research and reconfiguration solved that problem.

Ruby has given rise to a deployment automation tool called Capistrano. I haven’t any experience with Capistrano, but most report it to be very powerful and flexible. There are a number of articles on the Web detailing it’s use for deploying both Ruby and PHP applications. I’ll be giving this a go as well, but initially only with Ruby on Rails.

I also want to try working much closer with clients using the user story, feature driven and iterative approach. The aforementioned rapid prototyping is a key feature, required to assist communication and control the direction of development.

This extends to the presentation layer in the form of XHTML prototypes, using semantic mark-up of the featured content with very little styling. Semantic mark-up and a systematic descriptive naming scheme should allow the design to be applied largely independently.

Will it all work? I hope so, but the motivation alone is appreciated.