“I owe everything to this book and if I can learn its contents in a week, in a caravan with no computer, you can too.“

I’m going to share with you the book that is solely responsible for where I am today and it just might have the same effect for you too. However before I spill-the-beans on the name of the actual book, I’d like to share the events that happened after reading the book.

After reading this book, I ended up going back to college, now this wasn’t “I’ll do a course on…” this was “I’ll do EVERY course that interests me” and I promptly did. I did a dozen or more short courses at Bristol College, from HTML to Visual Basic, from graphic design to Java, I even did two courses on ASP and three courses on C++.

At one point I was spending four nights a week on these and still found room to start the revision needed to set myself on the way of studying for a MCSE through self revision. I still remember punching the air and that thrill of passing all those exams. They weren’t cheap and I failed a few but I got through a fair amount of them in a relatively short time. One set of books cost me over a £130 and contained 12 or so books and I still have a romance with Windows 2000.

This book also provoked me to make a computer, I wasn’t going to buy a computer I was going to make a computer, by pure fluke the latest copy of PC Advisor was covering this and over the next two issues I built my first computer. I still have it in my roof!

With the new computer, the first thing I wanted to do was get on the “Internet”, I had spent so much time at Uni covering the fundamentals (a HND in Electrical & Electronic Communications Engineering apparently) but had spent so little time actually working out how this[the Internet] could help me.

With the combination of the book that promoted me to go on a education bender, I ended up finding eBay, starting a business on eBay, quitting my (what was well paid) job, burning myself out, working for two SaaS companies and now starting a new business, that encompasses everything I’ve learned along the way.

So what was the book?

Learn HTML in a weekend. Ironically I did not learn it in a weekend with a computer, no I learnt it in a CARAVAN in a week with no computer. I can still write HTML without editors and enjoying playing with it today.

Of course, there are other distractions, such as PHP, Pyhon, CSS and so on that follow similar structures, but they all end up back at HTML and I sincerely do not believe for one moment that I’d be where I am without this book.

I checked this morning and you can pick this book up on Amazon for 1p, well 1p plus £2.80 postage (make sure you pick a UK seller if possible, the delivery time sucks from the US). Seems somewhat a bargain now considering the changes it made to me.

Have you had a similar experience with a single book before? If so what was it?