Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
Part way through Tracy Kidder's classic look at the computing industry, The Soul of a New Machine, one of the hardware team burns out and quits. After months of worrying about clock ticks and microseconds, his intent is to think about nothing shorter than a season. When I ...
Posted in Books, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, September 2nd, 2007
It's Sunday morning. My daughter (the cutest baby ever) is still asleep, my coffee is just the right temperature, and I have the pleasure of being able to review three very good books. If some passing Samaritan would mow my lawn for me, life would be pretty much ...
Posted in Books | 4 Comments »
Saturday, September 1st, 2007
Note: this review is now online at Doctor Dobb's Journal.
The lawn needs mowing, and I need to make up a marking scheme for the course I'm teaching this fall, so this is as good a time as any to catch up with my reviews. Over the summer, I read ...
Posted in Books | 1 Comment »
Thursday, August 9th, 2007
I know this is supposed to be a technical blog, but having just re-read three of Pratchett's Discworld books, I feel compelled to share. He's always funny, and there's always a sting in the tail. My personal favorites are:
Mort
Wyrd Sisters
Guards! Guards!
Small Gods
The Last Hero
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
Night ...
Posted in Books | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007
More recent academic reading:
Luo, Chen, and Yu: "Toward a progress indicator for program compilation." Software: Practice & Experience, 37:909-33, 2007. It turns out that building an accurate progress bar for compilation is a lot harder than you'd think. This is a good example of the kind of ...
Posted in Books, Research | No Comments »
Friday, July 13th, 2007
Beautiful Code now has its own blog, managed by Michael Feathers (author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code, which is one of my favorite programming books). If you'd like to contribute, we'd like to hear from you.
Posted in Beautiful Code, Books | No Comments »
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
If you'd rather buy it by the chapter, Beautiful Code is now available on Safari.
Posted in Beautiful Code, Books | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Matt Doar (author of one of my favorite recent books) has written a very nice review of Beautiful Code. Thanks, Mike... ;-) If you spot any others, I'd be grateful for links.
Posted in Beautiful Code, Books | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Bryan Cantrill, one of the contributors to Beautiful Code, has blogged about the possibility of stack overflow in the regular expression code written by Rob Pike that was the subject of Brian Kernighan's chapter. It's fun to read; I'm looking forward to more crosstalk of this kind.
Posted in Beautiful Code, Books | No Comments »
Monday, July 9th, 2007
C'mon, folks, we're still only in the number three spot for new programming books on Amazon, behind books on Photoshop and ActionScript. Remember, all the royalties go to a good cause, so by bumping us up to #1, you're helping to make the world a better place ;-)
Posted in Beautiful Code, Books | 3 Comments »