Posted by Doug
Thu, 05 Jun 2003 00:25:00 GMT
I just finished read the book by David J. Agans with the extremely long title I’m too lazy to retype. Despite that less than glowing introduction, I found the book enjoyable. That’s right. I actually used the word “enjoyable” with respect to a book on debugging. He starts off by establishing his credentials as a master debugger with lots and lots of years of experience and then categorically states his nine DebuggingRules are all you need to debug any problem. The book then spends a chapter on each rule breaking it down and explaining how to apply it. He makes heavy use of “war stories” to illustrate his point. This is really one of the two things that make the book enjoyable to read. The first is his good sense of humor spread liberally throughout the book. But it’s really enjoyable to read about problems other people have had and how they solved them then see a surgeon closely examine exactly what happened and how they found the solution. I think I paid the full cover price of $22 for the book. It’s taken me three days of reading it on and off while waiting for things to compile and such. It’s easy to read, has lots of good stories, and you walk away with a better understanding of the debugging process. All in all that’s a win.
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Posted by Doug
Wed, 14 May 2003 16:39:00 GMT
I noticed that jtl made mention of Hacker’s Delight. I actually saw this book and got to spend some time with it while I was in Boulder, CO. It is a really cool book. Lots of good examples of how to twiddle bits and do math efficiently. If you’re an embedded programmer, this book is probably a must. If you wish you were an embedded programmer (I’m pretty much in this category), buy this book and think about how cool it would be to actually use algorithms like this. If you’re a Visuall Basic programmer, go ahead and buy the book and see what kinds of issues “hard core” programmers deal with. If you’re a normal application programmer, go ahead and buy the book to learn how to think about efficient code. Bigger isn’t always better.
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Posted by Doug
Mon, 24 Feb 2003 01:17:00 GMT
I just finished reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. This may cast my geekiness in doubt, but I didn’t really like the book. First, it’s huge. Not that I have a problem with huge books; on the contrary. All I’m saying is that choosing to read this book is a fairly large investment of time. I don’t think I got much of a time/value return on reading it. Yes, Stephenson is like the geek’s Tom Clancy. That means he gives you much more detail than you ever really wanted to read. I guess I know now what real military types think of Tom Clancy now. Yes, there’s lots of detail; but, it’s either inane, an over simplification, or just silly. Second, the plot is very complex. There are at times three or four major plots. It was over half of the book before I realized how these plots related. It doesn’t really all come together until the last quarter of the book. In summary, it’s a pretty good story he just takes too long to tell it.
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