Archive for posts tagged ‘books’
Safari Reading
Kevin Day, October 30th, 2008If you haven’t heard about O’Reilly’s online book program, Safari, you really should give it a try. I wrote about it once before when I was doing a lot of Javascript development. I was able to read Crockford’s great Javascript book within a day of it’s publication.
Some of the most useful reading can be found in their “short cut” articles. One article counts for half of a book on my 10-book limit bookshelf, and it’s about 20 pages long on a very specific topic. I used the short cut article on Google Analytics to find the correct way to configure my Google Analytics account (there are a lot of options I didn’t know about).
They have a decent selection of business books as well. I got to read Eric Sink’s well-known Business of Software the other day.
I swear I’m not an O’Reilly schill though. I just think it’s fun to read on-demand.
What’s on your (Safari) bookshelf?
Kevin Day, May 10th, 2008I’ve been trying out the Safari bookshelf recently and it’s really nice. Despite the recent buzz that programmers don’t read books, I think published books (electronic or dead-tree) are the best way to lean a subject because they’re more complete and have been thoroughly edited.
For Safari, I have the 10-book-per-month plan, which is $23. I plan on needing a lot of reference material in the next few months so it’s a valuable resource to me at the moment. Some of the larger books take up more than one “book” on my 10-slot book shelf though. The books on my shelf right now are:
- JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition (2 slots)
- PHP Hacks (1 slot)
- Programming Amazon Web Services (2 slots)
- Programming Python, 3rd Edition (2 slots)
- JavaScript: The Good Parts (1 slot)
PHP Hacks is kind of a let-down, but the other four books are pretty good. I’m interested to find out if I’ll find any books that are useful enough to buy hard copies of after I’m done using Safari.
Asimov’s animated adjectives and adverbs
Kevin Day, January 6th, 2008I’ve noticed that I typically don’t use vivid words when describing things or events. My speech and writing are dry and tend to be strictly factual. It’s probably because that’s how most of my communication is expected to be.
While reading “I, Robot,” I was impressed with the way that Asimov combines provocative descriptions along with technical information, like this:
It was in the last room, the one nearest the nose, that the monotony broke. A curving window of non-reflecting glass was the first break in the universal metal, and below it was a single large dial, with a single motionless needle hard against the zero mark.
Or this:
The alarm system raised its fearful clangor with a horrifying suddenness. Lanning clicked on communications with an almost paralytic spasm. The breathless words froze him.
At work I would get weird looks if I said ”the single motionless needle was hard against the zero mark” instead of “the gage read zero.” Nonetheless, I am going to make an effort to be more descriptive when I get a chance.
Here’s a first attempt. The weather was pretty good today in Clevleand. Perhaps Asimov would describe it this way:
The sun heroically burst through the cloudy sky to rescue the tired city from its cold icy captor.
Player Piano Pontificating
Kevin Day, October 14th, 2007“Most fascinating game there is, keeping things from staying the way they are.”
That could be the official motto for engineers and hackers, but it’s actually a quote from Dr. Paul Proteus, an engineer and the main character of Kurt Vonnegut’s first book, Player Piano.
It was written in 1952, but the story takes place in roughly the year 2000. Despite the time difference, Vonnegut pegged society pretty well. For instance, if a factory worker gets displaced by a machine they have two choices: join the Army, or join the Reeks and Wrecks, a group that repairs broken machines and lives off government subsidies.
Another example of an accurate prediction is this scene where a foreign ambassador, Khashdrahr, is shown the home of a member of the Reeks and Wrecks in order to observe a typical American family. His escort, Doctor Dodge, is selling him on the benefits of civilized society:
“And this is the ultrasonic dishwasher and clotheswasher,” said Dodge. “High-frequency sound passing through the water strips dirt and grease off anything in a matter of seconds. Dip in, take out, bingo!”
“And then what does the woman do?” asked Khashdrahr.
“Then she feeds the clothes through this ironer, which can do what was an hour’s ironing in three minutes. Bing!”
“And then what does she do?” asked Khashdrahr.
“And then she’s done.”
“What is it she is in such a hurry to get at? What is it she has to do, that she mustn’t waste any time on these things?”
“Live!” said Doctor Dodge expansively. “Live! Get a little fun out of life.”
“And how is it you live and get so much fun out of life?” asked Khashdrahr.
Wanda blushed and looked down at the floor, and worried the carpet edge with her toe. “Oh, television,” she murmured. “Watch that a lot, don’t we Ed? And I spend a lot of time with the kids, little Delores and young Edgar Jr. You know. Things.”
“Where are the children now?”
“Over at the neighbors’ place, watching television, I expect.”
That conversation isn’t limited to married women though. If the word television were replaced with internet, it would describe my life fairly well. I guess except for the kids thing of course.
This is a fun book for engineers partly because there are lots of small examples of how technology affects people’s lives, and partly because the engineers are at the top of the social ladder. Oh, well, I guess everything couldn’t come out the way he predicted.
Book review: High Performance MySQL
Kevin Day, October 1st, 2007
High Performance MySQL is a great book for programmers new to database administration who are using MySQL. It has tips on writing faster queries, tuning database parameters, and indexing tables properly. While I had previously stumbled around with EXPLAIN statements and tried to guess what was going on with slow queries, this book demystified how MySQL really works.
This book is most useful for programmers looking for help beyond the standard introductory PHP/MySQL books and tutorials. It assumes that you know how to create a database-driven website but don’t know how to make it faster or deal with high traffic. It also covers the basics of databases such as transactions and index types.
I would have preferred a more detailed description of database tuning because there are a lot of settings to tweak, and it’s not easy to predict how they will work together. The book does provide a decent starting point though, and I now feel comfortable fiddling around with MySQL’s settings until I find the ones that work.
Overall, it’s a good book that will help any programmer using MySQL.
