According to Jeff Atwood, programmers don’t read anymore. And in my small slice of the universe he’s mostly right, a problem of motivation, time, and a lack of good reading materials.

So what’s a developer to do? How about you spend a few hours reading this week. Here are a few recommendations:

• A paper on Causality and probability theory (Postscript)
• A Kerneltrap post on the C semantics of constants and pointers (good comments too)
• A free Addison Wesley book on C++ Gotchas
• A manuscript on Linkers and Loaders
• A large collection of demos and essays on how to think in terms of extensible CSS
• Linus comparing the organization of the Linux Kernel to the evolution of the universe
• Dijkstra answers questions from students about software engineering
• A paper on coroutines in C
• A manuscript for an upcoming book on algorithms (PDF)
• A paper entitled ‘Software Is Hard‘

There’s no excuse for a professional who doesn’t read: understanding needs to be fostered and is always incomplete. And excellence is fueled by obsessively feeding, exercising, and applying the mind. So what are you reading this week?

Mark Richard’s Core Memory project, a coffee table book on vintage computers (Thanks John).

Scoble hits the nail on the head talking about Moguls, the serverless internet company:

How did Microsoft screw this up so badly? Let’s get this straight. Amazon used to be a book store. Now they are hosting virtualized servers for Internet companies. So much for having billions of dollars in the bank like Microsoft does, some of the smartest people in the world working in your research arms and having “monopoly” market share in operating systems.

An extension to mobile Safari that makes tabbed browsing easier. It’s a clever use of bookmarklets and iconic hovering menus that is just plain old fun to use.

Kottke hits it on the nail with Facebook’s lack of public content. Other people have suggested the creep factor, but I haven’t really seen much of it yet (cliques seem to keep to their own). In the end, its shelf life will be short, as is pretty much anything online.

Facebook does do something well that no one has been able to do yet, not AOL, not MySpace, or the others. They’ve captured relationships (networking in the business world) in a way that’s downright slick. It’s damned easy to use too, for the normal folk, and is providing a huge amount of entertainment for people who don’t normally hack at web stuff.

Some details on CSS-friendly elements in Safari 3.

SimpleBits (creators of slick icons) talks about the Anatomy of an Icon.

Get With the Program, a NYTimes article about the various tools authors are using today to create their universes. I’ve always seen a great potential for better (narrower?) writing tools, this confirms that there are still a few unexplored possibilities.

In the theme of groking your gut: The Hacker’s Diet, a free, classic text online … engineering for your self.

The official set of online Rails manuals, including a Rails cookbook and a good guide on Rail’s URL routing/rewriting. The docs for a user login plugin and an overview of plugins in general.