parseerror.com / ~pizza / books
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Lex & Yacc, 2nd ed. The skinny: I read a few chapters in this book, and tried using lex and yacc on my own, and I still find the tools completely baffling. 2003-09-30 |
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The Design Of Everyday Things The skinny: Of all the things this book taught me, the most important is that well designed objects can convey their use through their design alone. 2003-09-25 |
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How To Lie With Statistics The skinny: Still reading. Will talk later. 2003-09-25 |
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Snow Crash The skinny: Quick-paced, near-future, post-apocalyptic, cyber-punk. Good, if you're into that kind of thing. Still reading. Will talk later. 2003-09-30 |
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Airframe The skinny: While not exciting in the same sense as Jurassic Park, I still found myself turning page after page; read the book in two consecutive sittings. 2003-08-10 |
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crypto The skinny: A historical look at modern (specifically public key) cryptography. First half about eggheads making discoveries; second half mostly govt's suppression of crypto. First half way more interesting. I've always been interested in cryptography and had heard of stuff like public key, RSA, DES, 3DES, etc. before but I wasn't really sure how exactly they all fit together. Reading through this book went surprisingly quickly, I read 150 pages within 24 hours. After that it got boring, talking of politics. But reading all the stories of the guys who pretty much stumbled ass-backwards into public key and the methods of implementing it, and ended up creating the commercial crypto industry. Interesting stuff. 2003-03-11 |
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hackers The skinny: history of hackerdom. Still reading. gets less interesting when we hit the 80s 2003-02-09 |
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Ender's Game The skinny: A very good sci-fi story about a child genius named Ender. I'm not quite sure how to describe the book well w/o going into lots of detail. If you like sci-fi, you'll like this book. This book actually has alot of interesting messages, and yet I cannot put them well enough into words. In the end, the book is sad because no matter what happens, Ender's genius will always put him at odds with others. A great story for anyone who wants to be the best. 2002-09-02 |
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C# in a Nutshell The skinny: A "quick reference" of the exhaustive C# specification. Lots of information (800 pages!), lots of typos. I found 5 obvious typos just browsing the first 51 pages. You know O'Reilly cranked this book out quick. I have yet to read any other C# books (there are literally hundreds), and I have yet to write anything serious in C#, so I'm not certain whether this book is a good reference or not. I'll update this when I have a definitive answer. 2002-08-11 |
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The Elements of Java Style The skinny: A no-nonsense guide (more of a pamphlet than a book) to writing good Java. Short, to-the-point, unambiguous. Anyone doing serious Java work should have rules for development. As for the other 90% of Java monkeys... 2002-08-11 |
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Hacking Linux Exposed The skinny: HLE simply lays out every way feasible to compromise a system running linux and what the best countermeasures are. It acts less as a security tutorial and more of a field guide of generic and common security holes. Yes, there are a whole series of these books -- Hacking (Your OS Here) Exposed. Usually I don't like books like that because they seem manufactured and insincere -- but I must say, I think the reason they can afford to publish the whole series is because the book delivers. If I was an admin, I would want this book on my bookshelf. 2002-08-06 |
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Unix Hints & Hacks The skinny: Pretty good for what it does -- unfortunately, due to its goal this book is neither an good Unix reference nor a beginner's guide. Most of the stuff in this book can be figured out by someone who likes playing with Unix. It feels like alot of this book is filler... a few lines of piped commands followed by several pages of (mostly unnecessary) commentary, justification, real life exmaples, etc. I'd rather have seen and 3x the code and 1/3 the commentary. Not the first or even the second Unix book I'd recommend... get Unix System Administrator's Handbook if you want an exhaustive "how does that work" view of Unix, or get System and Network Admininstration for problem solving in your administrative duties or SA career. 2002-07-29 |
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The Tao of Objects: A Beginner's Guide to Object-Oriented Programming The skinny: Outdated (the examples are in C++ (OK) and Turbo Pascal (ugh!))... there are good messages here, but many are repeated unnecessarily. Many of the examples are very similiar and really don't add that much. I wouldn't recommend it to someone learning OO -- but then it doesn't look to be in stock at amazon or b&n, so I wouldn't worry about that too much. To be fair, the book was written in 1990; i'd be willing to take a look at a new edition written for perhaps Java and C++ or C#. This book could've been half as long, and probably would have been more powerful if it had been. 2002-07-25 |
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Postscript Language Tutorial and Cookbook The skinny: 200 pages of postscript example pictures, code and explanations. interesting examples, but they haven't covered everything i'd like -- I found the book useful, but not as a primary Postscript resource. 2002-07-20 |
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Ruby in a Nutshell The skinny: The authoratative Ruby reference, written by its creator. If you use Ruby, or want to check the language out, this is the first book I'd recommend. I always keep it handy when I'm coding in Ruby. Mr. Matsumoto really manages to cram the entire language reference and even some usage examples into 230 pages. 2002-07-20 |
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Death March The skinny: Stick with Fred Brooks' Mythical Man Month. This book has a repetitive feel to it -- I think Mr. Yourdon could have fit his analysis and advice into a pamphlet. 2002-07-20 |
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Unix Philosophy The skinny: Alot about a little. Not worth it. If you use/like *nix you either already know or already know about the good things about it (portable data, open source code, etc.) There is nothing here for regular *nix users. 2002-07-15 |
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The Practice of System and Network Administration The skinny: Easy to read, comprehensive "field guide" to the world of system administration. The book's layout is conducive to skimming -- the book is broken up into 1-2 page sections, which make it easy to jump in whenever you see something you like. I like this book. Though I'm not an admin, I find the work interesting and most of the lessons and stories can be appreciated by any computer geek. Oh, that's another thing I like -- the stories! Every few pages or so is a good-sized blurb with a story (usally from Mr. Limoncelli) that clearly illustrates the lesson or authors' point. Many books do this, but Practice does it well. 2002-06-22 |
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Postscript Language Reference (3rd ed) The skinny: Unless you need to get really intimate with postscript's interior, you will not need this book. I bought this book because I couldn't find a good html-to-pdf converter and I did find a great ps-to-pdf converter (ps2pdf via ghostscript). Therefore the easiest way to pdf (I didn't want to fool around with pdf libraries, this needed to get done *fast*) was to output ps and convert it. I thought the book could help me, and I always love an excuse to learn a new language. K&R it ain't. The book, though well done for its kind was way overkill for what I wanted to do. There is an entire postscript universe out there, and it's pretty neat, but I only need to wade in ankle deep so far. 2002-06-20 Update: This book is very good to have around when delving into Postscript. I am very glad I have it. 2002-07-20 |
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ANSI Common LISP The skinny: A fascinating introduction into the powerful yet sometimes confusing world of the LISP programming language. This book covers everything you want to know about LISP and then some; though I'm still a LISP newbie, so I couldn't tell you if it skips anything. While the book is readable, it's really the language that I got a kick out of. After all, how can one enjoy a book about something they don't enjoy? After reading it intensely and trying out many, many examples I feel like I could sit down with someone else's LISP and figure out the gist of things; though I must admit it -- some of it still baffles me. Mr. Graham has 2 pages' worth of code for a full-functional ray-tracer... how it works I still can't tell you. To be fair I haven't completed the book; I can only take so much LISP before my head feels like it will explode. But head-exploding aside, Mr. Graham's book is a very good one if you'd like to embrace parentheses and try out LISP. |
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The Mythical Man-Month The skinny: Though a bit short and dated, this is an interesting and informative read for anyone with an interest in the science of software development. This book should be required reading for programmer management. Mr. Brooks draws from his experience as a manager for IBM during the 1960's, specifically on the System/360 operating system. He systematically runs through common assumptions and practices and takes them apart, for better or worse. He backs up his conclusions with data.
The book holds its own for the most part because it discusses people and procedures more than actual code. Despite this the book does show its age. PL/I is discussed as a high level language. I couldn't help but laugh when Mr. Brooks referred to a colleague working on ARPANET.
I was actually a bit let down that the book ended after 170-odd pages. |
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Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools The skinny: The authoratative book on the science of design and construction of compilers. Written in a college "introductory course" style. Approachable, though not for those with only a passing interest. Also affectionately referred to as The Dragon Book, this is the book on compilers. The book is well-written, discussing complex language / parser computer science issues in very palatable language. |
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Unix System Administration Handbook The skinny: This book kicks ass. An alternative title would be "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About *NIX But Were Afraid To Ask". It tells you everything about the guts of the UNIX operating system and tells you where Redhat Linux, FreeBSD, HP-UX and Solaris differ. Invaluable. Ever since I got my current job in a Linux shop I've been asking lots of questions -- I really want to learn everything there is to learn about UNIX-like operating systems. What does rc.d do anyways? What's the 'd' for? What's the rc for? What does the kernel actually do? What exactly is a filesystem? Once I make it through this book I hope I'll be able to possibly answer some questions instead of asking all of them :) |
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Beginning XML The skinny: More than you ever want to know about XML. The first book I would recommend to someone that needs to figure out what XML is and how to use it. |
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Java & XML The skinny: Good but not great. The book is well-done, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible to have a great book that covers two subjects... maybe I'm wrong. |
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Java Cookbook The skinny: If you dabble in Java but aren't an experienced pro, you may find this book useful. OK, I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of Java. I find it slow and more importantly I find its syntax unwieldly at best. However, a project at work required me to do some. This book is great (I love the entire cookbook format) -- it shows common solutons to common coding issues. |
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Learning the vi Editor The skinny: If you're still using pico (or worse yet -- using vi but ignoring all its extremely useful features) then you'll do yourself a big favor by reading the first 50 pages of this book. First written in 1986 and still relevant today. Provides an extensive, logical tour through vi's (as well as vi's four most popular clones') many features. I picked enough up from the first 1/3 of the book to feel that I really get vi/vim now Update: I use this book all the time; I even bought the pocket reference to carry around with me. vi is such an extraordinarily powerful editor; if you use it -- buy this book. |
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Mastering Regular Expressions (1st ed) The skinny: The book on regular expressions. Anyone who uses any utility (grep, perl, etc) that makes use of either POSIX or extended regexes should read this book. I thought I knew regexes pretty well -- boy was I wrong. I've learned alot. Mr. Friedl correctly points out early on in the text that though regexes have been around for a long time and are widely-used, there is little in the way of good documentation on them. This book is certainly a step in the right direction. Known by many as MRE, this book takes a regex by-the-way-of-Unix by-the-way-of Perl. The only part I didn't like is the mini-perl tutorial, which comes early on. Sure, you need to know some basic Perl to make use of the later examples, but the mini-tut really turned me off. |
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An Introduction to Database Systems The skinny: Good material, bad writing. While C.J. Date is obviously an authority on all things database, Stephen King he ain't. This book is a tough read -- I know I should keep reading, because it contains alot of good information; however, I don't really want to, because the reading is a drag! My biggest bone to pick is the apparent lack of footnotes, so it seems as though every paragraph is followed by yet another paragraph qualifying/disqualifying what the author has just said. So, even though I've heard nothing to discredit the technical information in this book, and the fact that I'd really like to absorb what this book has to say... I just cannot make it past page 50. Does anyone have the Cliff Notes? |
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In the Beginning Was the Commandline The skinny: Short and pretty boring. Dissapointing. It starts off with an fairly short, interesting mini-history of UNIX... and goes downhill from there. |
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The Cathedral and the Bazaar The skinny: Nerds and open-source geeks will enjoy the book -- but I'd borrow it from the library before I bought it for my bookshelf. A collection of essays that Mr. Raymond has written about open source - software development, culture and other musings. The intro, entitled A Brief History of Hackerdom was very interesting. The first essay, from which the title of the book is taken, is the highlight of the book. Although Mr. Raymond tries to maintain that his analyses are unbiased and semi-scientific, he is obviously a huge cheerleader for the open source way of doing things. I also found the later essays to be a little too self-indulgent; Mr. Raymond spends more time talking about himself than he does his subject matter. |
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The C Programming Language The skinny: The best tech book ever written. Anyone who codes should read it. Short and sweet! After reading this book I consider my programming life as two periods — before and after I read K&R. I feel so much better now that I understand C -- the language from which UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems (*BSD, Linux, etc.) are built. It really isn't as hard as I had imagined. I'm now more confident to tackle scarier programming languages and projects. |
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Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer's Guide The skinny: The current Ruby Bible. There are few books currently out about Ruby and fewer still that are good. This one is. The book covers alot of material without being dull. When the authors say something they just come-out-and-say-it and I like that. Of course, I liked the subject matter, i.e. Ruby, to begin with, so I may be biased. Personally I found the book interesting because it kind of bridged my understading of lazy scripting and hardcore programming -- Ruby can do either and/or both. But that's another matter altogether. |
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Professional PHP Programming The skinny: Solid book, but pros can skip it. Aimed more at aspiring php coders than existing ones. The book covers alot of material without being dull. When the authors say something they just come-out-and-say-it and I like that. I can't say I really enjoyed this book, although it did show me a few new tricks (i.e. $array[] = 1 --> $array[sizeof($array)] = 1; Not particularly splendid writing, but readable. |
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Programming Perl (3rd ed) The skinny: The Perl Bible. Enough Perl wisdom and confusion for two lifetimes. I'll tell you what I think when I'm done — it could be awhile. I'm only up to Chapter 14. Another 600 pages to go. |
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Learning Perl The skinny: Straight-forward, kick-ass tutorial for Perl newbies. A must-read for someone just picking up Perl. Good from end to end; I decided to buy this book and not dive directly into Programming Perl because I didn't want to take anyhting for granted. I wanted to learn Perl from the ground up. And I'm glad I did. My adivce to anyone saying "I want to learn this Perl thing" is:
Mr. Schwartz's writing is a joy to read; he begins with very simple examples and builds them, step-by-step, into complex scripts without confusing the reader. A truly excellent tutorial. The only caveat is that I haven't found myself using the book since I read it. I figure this is due to:
There seems to be no need to return to the book — I find it's gathering dust on my bookshelf. |
