Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Sunday, June 21st, 2009
Two books that I've read and enjoyed recently:
Philip Ball: Universe of Stone: A Biography of Chartres Cathedral. Ball uses the construction of the great Gothic cathedral as a lens through which to examine the intellectual and technical world of Medieval Europe. Like all of his books, there is sometimes more ...
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Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
Books read recently at home, at ICSE'09, on vacation, and back at home:
Smith: Conquering the Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Online Course Design and Ko & Rossen: Teaching Online: A Practical Guide.The most immediately useful books about (re-)designing courses for online delivery I've come across so far, though I wish ...
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Thursday, May 14th, 2009
MIT Press has kindly given me permission to put my first book, Practical Parallel Programming, up on the web. Many of the specifics are out of date, but I think (at least, I hope) much of the discussion is still useful.
One problem, though: nobody has the electronic source for the ...
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Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
There was a box waiting for me in the mailroom today. "Oh," I thought, "That was quick---Amazon usually takes at least a week." But it wasn't Amazon---no, it was my first five copies of Practical Programming, each in its own individual bubblewrap sleeve. W00t! And woo hoo! And don't you ...
Posted in Books, Practical Programming, Teaching | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
Our new book, Practical Programming, is now available from Pragmatic (the publisher) and O'Reilly, as well as on Amazon.com --- yay! Topics include:
Basic programming from arithmetic to loops and conditionals
Using functions and modules to organize programs
Using lists, sets, and dictionaries to organize data
Designing algorithms systematically
Debugging things when they go wrong
Creating ...
Posted in Books, Practical Programming | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
I finished David JC Mackay's Sustainable Energy-Without the Hot Air on the flight back from Ottawa yesterday. First response: brilliant. Second response: absolutely brilliant. A physicist, Mackay approaches the question of whether the UK can run on sustainable energy sources by doing back-of-the-envelope calculations---hundreds of them. How much precipitation falls ...
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Thursday, April 16th, 2009
This time two years ago, most of them would have been computing books; now, they're a minority. Still looking for a readable, grounded, fast-paced guide to instructional design...
The Siege of Vienna
My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture
Cowboy Angels
A Splendid Exchange
With Speed and Violence
The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect ...
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Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
Another bunch of papers and books:
Sfetsos, Stamelos, Angelis, and Deligiannis: "An experimental invesgitation of personalit ytypes impact on pair efefctiveness in pair programming." Empirical Software Engineering, 14:187-226, 2009. The authors had 70 undergraduates do pair programming and measured effectiveness in terms of communication, velocity, design correctness, passed acceptance ...
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Sunday, February 15th, 2009
Back in December, I blogged the books I was planning to read in January and February. Here are the quick summaries:
Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages: too much "gosh wow" for me (and also too much shaky science).
The Online Learning Idea Book: to paraphrase, what was new wasn't interesting, ...
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Thursday, December 18th, 2008
Nice post from Toby Segaran (author of a very good book called Programming Collective Intelligence) that discusses the "excluded middle" of technical books---worth reading if you're thinking about writing anything for the geek market.
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