If he keeps one copy at home and one copy at the office, he could get done reading faster than if he left a single copy in one place and only read it at that place.

And he hired 4 people to read to him for each book. Now he could learn 8 times as fast.

Not if he outsourced the reading of said book to a foreign company. He would would have to check if their reading was the same as his every hour for 18 months that would have taken him 3 days to read it himself. Slowly.

I've often had thoughts of opening up a little web shop that anonymously shipped copies of The Mythical Man-Month in bulk.

I used to leave copies of Mythical Man Month on the seats of the MUNI in SF during the DotCom era. Also PeopleWare. Actually Patti Dunn gave me a few hundred extra copies of PeopleWare from some Barclays event I accidentally attended and I couldn't conveniently get them home on my bike, so that was a one-time event.

I so enjoyed the pragmatism of Crockford's "Javascript: the good parts" that I gave it away for a while too.

Sometimes I would print out great tracts like "big ball of mud" and leave them at appropriate places in SF.

Eventually I realized I was either preaching to the converted or preaching to the wilderness. So I stopped. But you've inspired me to reconsider anonymous viral software evangelism, at least for a brief moment.

| But you've inspired me to reconsider anonymous viral software evangelism, at least for a brief moment.

That is likely the best complement I've gotten this week.

Good one. I chuckled.

nice