Shadow of the Giant
May 23, 2006
The fourth book in Orson Scott Card’s Shadow-saga is as engaging as the previous: the Battle School children have grown up and are getting greedy for power. A power struggle is taking place involving the muslims, ruled by Caliph Alai; Emperor Han Tzu of China; and Verlomi, goddess of India. Together these three rule more than two thirds of the people on Earth. Working hard to take over the rest is Peter Wiggin, the Hegemon.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
February 18, 2006
Bill Bryson takes us on a whirlwind tour through the history of science; in less than six hundred pages he covers the origin of the universe, the vastness of space, the truly miniscule sizes of things at an atomic level, the elements, scientists bikkering over the age of Earth (and pretty much anything else), life at the very extremes, the discovery of DNA, the rise of Man and the extinction of the Dodo. It is a succinct and truly fascinating read.
Everyone should read this book.
Interview with the Vampire
November 20, 2005
I’ve been intending to read some of Anne Rice’s books for some time, but I’m sad to say I’m fairly disappointed with this one. It is a surprisingly boring book about a fascinating subject. As I read, I kept thinking “Surely something will happen soon?”, but unfortunately it never did.
We’re a fly on the wall in an interview with the vampire Louis. He is made a vampire by Lestat, who (presumably) in an effort to control Louis tells him very little about their origin and claims they are alone in the world. Though I disliked Lestat from start to finish, Louis seemed OK at first. After a while it turns out he’s the worse of the two though. He’s a pompous and depressing sentimental coward whose moping around and whining about his cursed existence soon gets on your nerves.
The Last Continent
November 13, 2005
The Librarian is critically ill and keeps turning into a hairy deck-chair, Ponder Stibbons becomes the right hand of a God and Rincewind drinks a lot of Australian beer. No worries.
Jingo
November 8, 2005
Jingo is the 21st Discworld novel. I finished reading it last weekend, but never got around to saying anything about it. I generally don’t, as there are so many of them. I thought I’d mention this one though, because it is ludicrously political. Though many of the previous books in the series deal with speciesism, this is the first one that deal with racism, and makes for a pretty darn good satirical critique of it.
Test-Driven Development
February 20, 2005
- Author: Kent Beck
- ISBN: 0-321-14653-0
The book is made up of three parts. The first 17 chapters, roughly half the book, is devoted to an extremely detailed example of implementing multi-currency arithmetic using TDD (Test-Driven Development). This part is enormously repetitive; you can probably get away with reading only every other page.
The second part is an example of how to implement the xUnit test framework using TDD. Beck switches from Java, which he uses in the first part, to Python for this bootstrapping exercise. There are comments for Python newbies along the way, so this part doubles as a Python tutorial. While not as repetitive and detailed as the first part, this part is not much easier to follow. Maybe I missed something on the way, but I found this part a bit contrived.
The last part of the book is devoted to patterns for test-driven development. Beck covers techniques for dealing with broken tests, refactorings and design patterns particularly suited for TDD and more. I was getting bored by now, so I must admit to skimming this part of the book.
This book is not an easy read. The first part in particular is so repetitive and focuses so much on the details that it pretty much fails to paint the big picture. Luckily for us, Beck decided to add some appendices. The second of these, despite being just over two pages, the book on its own. It shows how one could arrive at an implementation of a Fibonacci routine using TDD. In contrast to the rest of the book, this example is short and straight to the point. Halfway through part 1, when your brain starts seeping through your ears and ruins your favourite cardigan, turn to the Fibonacci example on page 211. It’s a vital complement to the rest of the book, showing in broad strokes how TDD works.
This might sound like a terribly negative review. However, I believe the ideas and principles introduced in this book are so important that they can easily rise above my bashing of their presentation.
TDD is quite possibly the most influential concept I have come across. I wish I came across these ideas several years ago, as I believe it would have saved me an awful lot of grief. I strongly suggest you give this book a chance.
Christmas reading
December 29, 2004
I’m half-way through Steve McConnell’s Code Complete 2 and I am now thoroughly bored. There’s a lot of good advice in there, but the book is just so damned big… It’s probably not helped by me being a bit of a slow reader.
Yesterday I bought and read a book called The Idler’s book of Crap Jobs. It’s a rated collection of 100 really shitty jobs, by accounts of the Idler’s readers. A few were funny, but ’twas mostly tedious reading. Luckily it was really short.
Today I’ve finally started one of the books I’ve been looking forward to read for some time. It’s called Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel and said by Neil Gaiman to be “unquestionably the finest English novel of the fantastic written in the last seventy years“. I’m only a few chapters in, but I’ll be giving a fuller account when I’m finished.
HALO: The Fall of Reach
November 13, 2004
Nadia bought the HALO three-piece book set and since I don’t play the game I figured I’d read the books. This is the first book of the trilogy, and, to my knowledge, the video-game to book adaptions I’ve read. It was actually better than I expected.
Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
October 11, 2004
- Author: Kent Beck
- ISBN: 0-201-61641-6
Software development projects can be fun,
productive, and even daring. Yet they can consistently
deliver value to a business and remain under
control.
The book consists of three main parts made up of 27 chapters, all crammed into 166 pages (not counting the glossary and index). The first part explains the problem with current software development practices. The second part covers how Extreme Programming (XP) provides a solution to the problem. The third part covers how your team can make the switch to XP.
Beck uses the act of driving a car as a metaphor for the XP software development process. Carefully pointing a car in the right direction, locking the steering wheel in a death-grip and flooring the accelerator is seldom a good way of getting from A to B. Sure, you must have the “big picture” idea of where you’re going and how to get there, but you should be prepared to apply constant small adjustments to the direction, brake and accelerator as you go along to make sure you stay on the road. Additionally, you better be prepared to ask for directions unless you know exactly where you’re going.
One concept introduced early on is the four variables of a software development project: cost, time, quality and scope. To successfully develop a high-quality project on time and to budget, external forces (customers and managers) get to decide the value of any three of these variables and the development team gets to decide the value of the fourth. Beck explains how quality and time tends to suffer when external forces get to pick the value of all the four variables, leaving you with crappy software behind schedule.
The importance of testing, refactoring, pair programming and short release cycles is stressed throughout the book, as is keeping a constant dialog with the customer. Also covered is how to manage an XP team, as well as the various “specialist” roles (coach, tracker, tester, etc) within the team itself.
One feeling I am left with after reading this book is that the term Extreme Programming is a terrible misfit. The term, at least to me, conjures up an image of tireless programmers holed up in a cave of computers programming hard & fast for 36 hours a day. However, this is not at all an accurate image. In my opinion, the processes and concepts described in this book are better described as Extremely Sensible Programming. Hardly as catchy though.
Should you read this book? Yes, I think so.
Books I’ve read lately
September 25, 2004
I’ve managed to get through a number of books lately. Here’s some of them:
I bought The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time after seing it mentioned in someone’s blog (Joel Spolsky, perhaps?). It was funny and sad; enjoyable, but also frustrating. A thoroughly good read.
Not too long ago I read The Salmon of Doubt, a collection of writings by the late Douglas Adams. I must admit that I found this one rather boring; that is, up until the partially finished Dirk Gently novel. That part was quite good, but, alas, you guessed it, unfinished.
More recently than that I’ve read Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic and Equal Rites. Call me weird, but although I’ve heard more from others about the first two, I definately preferred the third. I can’t quite explain why, but it captured me in a way the two first ones did not. I simply found it much harder to put down.
I haven’t just read fiction either. Steven Levy’s Hackers is a fascinating tale of computer wizards spanning three decades.
I’ve also read a few tech books, but I’ll get back to them later.
