Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

Cathedrals and Limits

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 ...

Recently Read

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 ...

OCR for Line Drawings?

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   Many of the specifics are out of date, but I think (at least, I hope) much of the discussion is still useful.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 ...

A Package Just Arrived

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 ...

“Practical Programming” Is Available

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 ...

Without the Hot Air

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 ...

Current Reading Queue

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 ...

Recent Reading

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 ...

Reading Update

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, ...

Segaran on the Excluded Middle

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.