Entries Tagged as 'Books'

Sep 11

Book Recommendation - The Productive Programmer, Neal Ford , O'Reilly [ISBN: 978-0-596-51978-0]

ColdFusion , Books 2 Comments »
This book is an easy to read set of hints tips tools and theory to make you as productive as possible in your development work.
It is in two parts.

Part 1 highlights a whole series of tools (the 'Mechanics') to make you more productive.

Part 2 focus on various practices to make you more productive.

Neal uses Windows, OSX, and other Linux flavours in his day to day work so he mentions tools on all 3, or sometimes just hidden features of the OS itself. Some stuff I already knew but I found a wealth of goodies which I have been trying out since.

He structures these tips around the headings of
  • Acceleration - doing stuff quicker
  • Focus - doing stuff without distractions
  • Automation - getting the computer to do the hard work
  • Canonicality - making sure we have just one copy of things
The Canonical section was particularly interesting with good examples from his experience (which I could relate to) of times when not having central, common copies of certain resources can trip up and delay or damage development. Source control is the obvious example, but Neal has several more.

Part two of the book looks less at the Mechanics and more at how you work; the 'Practice' of being a productive programmer. Again some of his topics were familiar to me already, such as Test Driven Development, but most had new slants.

He ends this section with some interesting views on how programming languages are developing for the future. Neal sees more domain specific languages and that these will be used in combinations to solve problems.

The book has is own wiki at http://productiveprogrammer.com for you to contribute or discuss the topics raised.

Every development team should read this!
Mar 16

Fancy another good read?

Books No Comments »
After reading The Algebraist I went straight on to another Ian M Banks book.



Consider Phlebas is a 'Culture' novel. The Culture are a society of the future with certain ideals that they feel are so superior that they should supercede all other societies. Like the Borg but not really evil just powerful and convinced they are right!

Thats probably a simplification, but the book is a great read with a hero who has set himself against The Culture within the context of a galactic war. As always Banks manages to create entirely believable worlds and species, and marrys them with an exciting and imaginative plot.
Feb 20

Fancy a good read?

Books No Comments »
cover of The Algebraist I used to be a voracious Science Fiction reader, but a few years ago I got a little bored with the genre, and read lots of other stuff instead.

On the recommendation of a friend, I recently returned to SF in the form of The Algebraist by Iain M Banks.

Its got me hooked again! It has all the best attributes of a SF novel. It creates an entirely believable futuristic universe, with aliens that go beyond the star-trek-humanoid-with-a-funny-shaped-head variety! The Dwellers for example, are a major feature of this book. They are an extremely long lived species which consequently have a very different outlook on life. Their society operates with little formal structure, where status is based on kudos and kudos is earned in a variety of surprising ways!

Travelling around the Galaxy, even close to light speed can still take years, unless you can use the managed system of wormholes. This system of wormholes is really the basis of the story, following a rumour that the Dwellers have their own private wormhole network.

A bit confusing to start with, the plot jumps across several strands which appear unconnected, but eventually converge. The writing is excellent and paints both scenes and emotions with a consumate skill.

If you like SF, this is a real treat.
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