WIP: Starting to fill in reading list

reading-list.md

@@ -4,5 +4,39 @@ title: Reading List
 permalink: /reading-list/
 ---
 
-My reading list.
+**Outline:**
 
+???
+
+## Introduction
+
+This page lists some books about various aspects of software development and
+software engineering that I have read over the years, especially during a
+particularly intense period in the 2007-2008 time frame.  I provide a brief
+overview of the content of each book and why I think it is useful (or
+essential) to read the book and what to look for.  These books, along wtih the
+personal application of the ideas presented in them over the next few years,
+represent my basic education in software engineering.
+
+To provide some context and motivation for this reading list, I describe my
+background and experiences.  When I started my Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering
+in 1996 at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), I knew that I liked writing code
+and I liked the challenge of learning and mastering the C++ language.  My
+first C++ book was ??? and I read that book cover-to-cover in about 2 days.
+Then I read B.S's book "The C++ Programming Language" cover-to-cover a few
+months after that.  While that book mostly just covered the C++ language, the
+author made some references to writing tests and some other basic software
+engineering best practices but it was very minimal (after all, this was a book
+about a programming language, not software engineering).  Later my first year
+of grad school I was introduced to the book "Design Patterns" by a Computer
+Science Ph.D. student at CMU.  Armed with that knowledge of C++ and Design
+Patterns, I set about writing a sizable amount of software implementing
+advanced numerical algorithms for constrained optimization as part of my
+Ph.D. work (the optimization package at that point was called rSQP++ for
+reduced successive quadratic programming).
+
+
+
+
+
+???