In which I revisit #oow09 mind expansion...in 2015

I threw away a book this week.

I think it's fairly public knowledge by this point that my employer is moving from its current office to a new one about a mile away. In preparation for the move, I'm getting rid of things that I don't need. This is difficult - I still want to hang on to my RAIDbook - but there are some things that I'm painfully parting with.

I wrote about one of these things back in 2009, when I won a book as a prize at Oracle OpenWorld 2009. The book is entitled PeopleSoft Developer's Guide for PeopleTools & PeopleCode: Create and Distribute High-Performance Applications and Reports. Although it was a very useful book to some, I had no direct use for it myself.

But I justified my retention of the book.

So I'm not going to throw Judi Doolittle's book away, even though technically neither I, nor anyone else in my company, can technically use it. I'm going to read it, and while I'll see some things that I understand (I have a bit of knowledge about XML, primarily derived from ANSI/NIST-ITL 2-2008...), I'm going to be exposed to things that I have never seen before, and there will be a lot of it that I don't understand, but after a while a little bit of the stuff that I didn't understand will start to make sense. (Assuming Doolittle writes well, but I assume that she does if Oracle Press invested the time in printing her book.)

So, over the last five-plus years, how often did I crack open the PeopleSoft book to expand my mind? I don't have the precise number of occurrences, but I'd say that "zero" is probably a pretty accurate estimate.

While past performance is not an indicator of future results, in this instance it's safe to say that I probably won't crack the book open at the new office either.

So I trashed it.

One other consideration, if I can quote from my 2009 post:

And, as Larry promised, PeopleSoft will be supported for ten years, although that doesn't mean that 8.9 per se will be supported.

According to Oracle's website, the current version of PeopleSoft is 9.2.

And yet another consideration - will Justin Kestelyn be insulted that I threw away an Oracle Technology Network giveaway?

Probably not. Kestelyn left Oracle almost three years ago.