The Idea
We had the idea to pick a book to study – running at the rate of one session a month. Those signing up for the programme would be supplied with a copy of the book – an actual physical book – and monthly sessions would be held to discuss what we had been reading most recently. Each month we would have the aim of reading, and – more importantly – understanding, a chapter or group of chapters. The target audience was our managed services support engineers; the idea was to provide them with further detail to help them understand the client issues they were seeing, and to underpin the recommendations they were making.
The Book
The first book chosen was Benjamin Nevarez’s SQL Server Query Tuning and Optimization (for SQL Server 2022). We started with studying and discussing one chapter at a time, but accelerated as the chapters got shorter, and the book got into areas that none of our clients are using – after all, this process is to help our engineers learn more detail about the issues they’re encountering day-to-day.
The Process
Study time was to be incorporated into our regular Professional Development time – this is scheduled ring-fenced time allocated to everyone each month for studying, reading, exams, writing blog posts, anything that’s not part of the day-to-day job. This is one of the perks of working at Coeo. There are no short-cuts to this sort of learning; one of the first cohort asked if there was an electronic copy of the book that he could copy/paste into ChatGPT to get it to create a summary for him to learn from. This idea was quickly shot down.
The leader of the group would also study the material, but in greater depth, identifying supporting links and documents, guessing what questions were likely to be asked, preparing exercises if required, and all the other preparation work that will come as no surprise to those used to teaching or preparing conference sessions.
The Sessions
Sessions were delivered in a mix of face-to-face and remote, although the sessions always feel more difficult when run fully remote. We would run through the main ideas in the chapter, how they hung together, how they built on the work from previous chapters – this was often aided by use of mind-maps created by the session leader. This would be a relatively free-flowing conversation, rather than a more formal training teacher-at-the-front type situation. It was rare that any of these sessions were less than an hour, so allow plenty of time.
What Next?
I’m looking for suggestions of books that can be covered in future iterations of the Book Club. Ideally, something that doesn’t build on previous chapters, so people can drop in and out of sessions according to their availability and interest. I was thinking about the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives books or the Tribal SQL Server book, but I quickly found – to my horror – that none of them are less than ten years old and difficult to get hold of in quantity.
So, dear reader, what books do you recommend for this? Or are physical books of this sort a thing of the past?