Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Monday, March 1st, 2010
After my PyCon lightning talk about software architecture, I got a couple of inquiries along the lines of, "So what kind of description are you actually looking for?" Michael Nygard's chapter in Beautiful Architecture is a good example, but an even better one is Philip Ball's wonderful book Universe of ...
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Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is a darning indictment of an "intelligence" agency that has an unparalleled half-century record of failure: "darning" rather than "damning" because the author's obvious anger makes the book sound one-sided.
The Year's Best Science Fiction (25th and 26th editions): gems of ...
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Thursday, November 26th, 2009
71 people have answered our questionnaire about Practical Programming. Here's some of what they told us; I'll summarize the questions about use of online programming resources and what we could do differently next time in a subsequent post.
Posted in Books, Practical Programming, Python, Teaching | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
It's been a busy three months---I was dropping balls left and right even before I got sick. In amongst all of it, though, I managed to get through a few books.
The first, and most disappointing, was Mills's Practical Formal Software Engineering. It's meant to be a textbook on formal methods ...
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Friday, September 4th, 2009
Posted in Books, Writing | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Mostly driven by my dream of updating the Software Carpentry course (you can follow my progress, such as it is, on the blog). Now, would someone please write "GIS with Python"?
Web Application Design Patterns
Python: Visual QuickStart Guide
Bioinformatics Programming Using Python
Web 2.0 Architectures: What entrepreneurs and information architects need to know
Web ...
Posted in Books, Software Carpentry | 2 Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2009
I just finished reading Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. It's a rare thing: deeply reactionary, yet (mostly) well argued. Here's its central complaint:
We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power... But we have failed utterly to ...
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Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Yet more evidence that Mike Gunderloy must have cloned himself several years ago---how else to explain how much he gets done, and how quickly? His new Rails Freelancing Handbook is exactly what the title suggests: guidance from a successful freelancer for people who'd like to be one. Chapters include:
Is Freelancing ...
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Friday, July 17th, 2009
Adam Goucher has posted a blow-by-blow --- sorry, chapter-by-chapter --- summary of O'Reilly's upcoming Beautiful Testing. There's lots of good stuff here from lots of smart people --- I'm looking forward to it.
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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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