On and off, I've tended to read quite a bit. So, I thought I'd put up some reviews of books as I read them. In time, I may go back and add reviews of some of the books I read in the past. Not massively exciting, but I suppose it may be of interest to someone, somewhere (perhaps).
Concurrent Systems - Jean Bacon
This is another book from my undergrad days, never thoroughly read at the time. It was written to accompany the lecture course of the same name by the author. If I remember correctly, the course was not terribly highly regarded, and I think the reason for that is also reflected in the book.
First though, the subject matter! It's incredible what's changed since the late '90s. The current example of big distributed system, the large website, was not around. The insane scalability of Google, Amazon and the rest just wasn't at this scale, and that area certainly hadn't become academic. It's now hard to buy a machine which isn't multicore, and massively multicore is lurking around the corner. Software transactional memory is now very trendy, but not mentioned at all in the book. The overriding memory assumption from the time was that physical memory was much smaller than VM - typical memory at the time of writing was 16MB. The book emphasises the slowness of hard disks and increasing performance gap compared to main memory, but improving SSDs could really be a game-changer here. Even the talk of modern RISC CPUs looks sadly dated in light of the modern x86 farce.
So, the book's obviously got to be read in the context of its time, but most of the academic points still stand. It's obviously an introductory text - the preface makes some reference to being usable as a jumping-off point for postgrads, but I think that's pretty laughable. To put it in perspective, the book often refers the reader to other undergrad books for further information. We're not talking an awful lot of depth.
However, that's not the point. What it's after is a unified framework for discussing 'concurrent systems'. This covers OSes, databases and distributed systems as the main examples. The OS material feels weak, covering just enough to bring up issues of concurrency, but nothing more. Perhaps it would have been better to make a simple OS course a pre-requisite?
The book suffers from a woolly style. When discussing design choices in the introductory section, bets are hedged to an almost useless level. 'Requirements' are talked about in a way that hints at the common implementation, without discussing it. No technical details or judgements are given, so the reader is left with an uneasy sense that they've just had the obvious explained to them, slowly. There is excessive recapping - after a section, it'll tell you just what you've read and how it relates to what you read previously. The chapter summary will then do the same, very blandly. It's like it's expected to be dipped into, one paragraph at a time, by the terminally dumb.
Interestingly, this has been an excellent example of reading style to me. I sometimes write technical documents in a not dissimilar style, and this, well, it shows me how and why not to do it that way!
This review so far has been harshly negative, but it's not a bad book. Once you get past the introductory generalisations, it picks up. The tone is mostly non-specific and high-level, but occasionally it throws in and discusses fundamental concurrent algorithms - things that are very tricky to get right. The explanations of correctness may be unconvincing (I'm starting to believe concurrency primitives need to be model checked - a heavy eyeballing is insufficient), but there are neat snippets of hardcore algorithms.
The core of concurrency primitives and transaction mechanisms are pretty reasonable, although I occasionally found I'd picked up the wrong end of the stick from her text. Whenever she returned to distributed systems, the text bogged down and waffled again.
The book ends with a series of case studies, which I hoped might be a high point. The discussion of traditional (non-modular, uniprocessor) Unix was pretty good, but the NT case study felt badly copied from a real guide to NT. The Java/middleware example was depressing, and the transaction processing example, based on cash machine networks, was almost entirely information-free - a very sad end to the book.
I don't have a good alternative to this book - my library is understocked on the transactions-and-concurrency front - so there's not much else I can recommend, but... I'm afraid I certainly don't recommend this book.
Permalink. Posted 08:15, Mon, 01 Mar 2010.
Dynamic Hedging - Nassim Taleb
Forget The Black Swan. Once you strip away all the philosophising, I think this provides a better (or at least more concrete and less pretentious) insight into the mind of Nassim Taleb. This book discusses the trading and risk management of derivatives.
The book is refreshingly open, in that it discusses the various ways in which the markets can be manipulated to hit barriers and limit orders, saying this is fairly standard and should be accounted for. This is, I suppose, the flip side of gap risk.
His view of the world is almost a charicature of a numerate trader. The book goes on about things the author had to fight to explain to less numerate colleagues (the author does like to go on about himself, his views, and his abilities). On the other hand, the author dismisses the quant view of the world as precisely inaccurate, preferring instead a certain amount of street-smarts. However, he then goes on to make the sort of silly mathematical mistake he picks up on in others, as his intuition occasionally fails him. For example, either he or his editor has picked up the entirely wrong end of the stick on the reflection principle for barrier options.
His editor has a lot to answer for. The book is flabby where it should be terser, and terse where it should be more explicit. Some sections go into incredible detail over a very simple concept, while other passing remarks are annoyingly obscure. They could mean something straightforward, or something very subtle - it's hard to tell. There are plenty of graphs in the book, and for the most part these are a good thing. Sometimes, though, the graph is badly chosen, and in other cases, the axes are just left obscure. Frustrating.
It's also a bit of a time capsule. Written in the mid-'90s, the models are charmingly naive (local vol being viewed as fancy), the exotic options are straightforward, and he keeps recommending binomial trees as an appropriate pricing mechanism. More than a little rustic, nowadays.
The book is like a form of Wittgenstein's Ladder. It provides a framework for thinking about risk management, but by the time you start to feel comfortable with his arguments and the concepts behind them, you might well disagree with them! The volume provides a much better insight into (an earlier) Taleb than The Black Swan. It shows him up as yet another fairly bright, experienced derivatives trader with delusions of grandeur. What a shock.
Permalink. Posted 03:43, Tue, 16 Feb 2010.
Coders at Work - Peter Seibel
This appears to be a fairly trendy book, given I've seen it in the office, it's kicked up a fuss on Joel on Software, etc. etc. My copy is actually a Christmas present from a friend - yay! The book is a set of interviews with famous programmers. Fifteen programmers, six hundred pages, and quite a lot of repetitive questioning, and even some repetitive answers.
The repetition, though tedious, is actually one of the more interesting things - seeing what's constant across these experienced developers. The most difficult to find bugs really are threading bugs, or maybe bugs in GC code. A surprising number of really talented individuals still debug using inserted 'print' statements, rather than symbolic debuggers. And plenty of people dislike C, as being too low-level for both the user and compiler, and being insecure. Ken Thompson still sees nothing wrong with it, though. ;)
In a world containing a decent number of really very good programmers, and so very many incompetent programmers, it's interesting to see what these people have worked on, and how elitist their world view is. The most interesting characters have worked at both very high and low levels, are comfortable with the full stack, and having worked on some really very hardcore stuff. Their views were the more interesting ones.
In comparison, there were a few people who are heading towards the 'methodology' end of the spectrum. That is, they care more about reproducable development processes for the talentless, rather than what really makes good developers. They tend to focus on a good system for people who use libraries as black boxes, rather than those who break the boxes open, or build them. They answered questions with what they felt should be the right answer, rather than what they really do. I suppose there's an important place in the world for such people, but... oh, it's so soulless.
I thought some of the most interesting characters were at the start and end of the book. It opens with Jamie Zawinski, who I thought was just some mouthy Netscape developer, but he's really done some cool stuff. Brad Fitzpatrick is the guy behind LiveJournal, so I was expecting tedious Web 2.0 guff, but he's the person behind memcached, and is really deeply into scalability, doing more hands-on work with a madly scaling system before he left uni than most people get in a lifetime.
The penultimate interview is with Bernie Cosell. 'Who?', you might ask if you're not massively up on your computing history. He's one of the developers who worked on the IMP - the first networking hardware of the internet. In many ways, he's in by fluke, as it could have been any old BBN developer assigned to this random project. However, he makes a great interviewee, as he goes into great detail about the way he works, and demonstrates far more skill than the abstract wafflers.
Finally, the book closes with an interview with Donald Knuth, who really is a complete hacker. Why he does literate programming is a bit of a mystery to me, given he's such a hardcore hacker. He really doesn't seem to believe in abstraction, mostly because it's less fun. The interview does, however give me insight into TAOCP. Nowadays, it seems like an awful choice of algorithms textbook, since there are much better ones on the market. However, in historical context it makes sense, and it still has more logic to it when you hear of the other planned volumes in the series. The nuttiness is explained by Knuth's obscurist obsession. It's not a data structures and algorithms series, it's a monograph on 'cool things I've found in the last half century'.
Other high points include the only interview in the book with a woman, which as well as covering Fran Allen's optimising compilers work, does at least inspect the issue of gender in coding. As I said, the book (at 600 pages long, with plenty of repeated questions and answers) can be rather tedious reading in places. For an experienced developer, it doesn't necessarily teach you a lot about the techniques available. However, the occasional passage shines through, and by standing back and observing the overall pattern of results, you can pull your own trends out. And from the point of view of the history of computing, it's pretty cool. Not everyone you'd want to hear from is there, and the missing people will surely depend on your personal taste, but still... it's good stuff.
Permalink. Posted 04:28, Wed, 30 Dec 2009.
Programming Perl (2nd edition) - Wall, Christiansen and Schwartz
I've had this book a while. To give you an idea, the third edition came out in 2000. I've only just finished actually working through it, and more on that below. Why's it taken me so long to read it? The idea of Perl seems to me to be a good one - I think I should like it. A nice scripting language that makes gluing together text files and generally doing Unix shell things easy. Indeed, I do tend to use it for this purpose.
In practice, however, I don't like Perl. There are several reasons. I don't like 'there's more than one way to do it'. I like the idea there's a correct, neat way to do something, the Platonic ideal to which one should aspire. So, you can write many languages in Perl, and this makes maintenance a nightmare. Even if you stick to idiomatic Perl, the object structure and module structure... yuck. Even for retro-fitted features, they're disgusting. It could have been a small, neat language, but but it's just grown ugly. Or perhaps it's neat, but in just such an alien way.
But most of this reasoning stems from the fact that fundamentally, I don't understand Larry Wall, therefore I don't understansd this book, therefore I don't understand Perl. This book is supposed to be the description of Perl. However, it's full of Larry Wall's rambling, jokey descriptions. Which would be fine except I still have no idea about how a Perl expression might be executed. There's no precision in any description of how expressions are put together and evaluated - the exact meaning of the different contexts and data structures, how built-in structures differ from user-defined functions, and generally, how one might get an understanding of how you'd interpret a program.
But that's apparently ok, because the book's full of example code, and Perl has all these convenient little special corner cases anyway. It's like a conversational language course that doesn't bother with grammar, but instead lets you pick the language up 'naturally'. Except programming requires lawyerly command of a language. Furthermore, you want this book to be usable as a reference - after all, it has a chapter called 'The Gory Details'. However, I can never find what I'm after in it. Grrr.
So, why have I finally finished reading this book? I think Perl's a badly designed, badly described, and badly extended language built around a good idea. It still does lovely text handling, and the operators it has make it, in many ways, rather like a functional language - as shown in Higher Order Perl, which I suspect is a book that'd almost make me like Perl. However, what I really want now, is to have the power of Perl in a proper (and statically typed) functional language, rather than write functional programs in Perl. So, I've been re-reading up on Perl with a view to seeing how difficult it'll be to do Perl-style basic text manipulation in Haskell. If I can do all the scripting I used to do in Perl in Haskell, I shall be a happy man.
Permalink. Posted 21:58, Wed, 23 Dec 2009.
Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientist - Benjamin C. Pierce
First, a confession: I haven't really read this book. It's a maths book, and I've skipped the exercises and the most difficult bits. I'm now doing my second reading. However, I'm reviewing it anyway, as I would eventually like to clear my backlog of partially-read maths books which I've neither approximately finished, nor reviewed.
Why read about category theory? My day job is Haskell programming, and the others on my team are all into this stuff. I feel slightly silly not knowing it. :) Why this book? There are plenty available, and I chose this one because it's an introductory text intended for computer scientists. I don't want to start with the full generality being applied to abstract cases of no relevance to a computer scientist. Who knows... I may get there eventually, but that's not where I want to start. Even saying 'I want an introductory book for computer scientists', there are a few books on the market. I really rated Pierce's book on type systems, so I chose him again!
Is the book any good? Yes! It does what it says on the tin - it provides an explanation of the basic stuff, with a strong slant towards computer science and almost no mention of topology. The start of the book introduces the concepts, then there's a chapter giving a few simple examples in computer science (plus one complex one - that's going to be a painful one to read properly!), and finally there's a chapter on interesting books and papers in the field. It's a slim volume, at 100 pages all-in, but this feels the right length for a book like this. It's dense, and for a simple introduction any more would be overwhelming.
The style is pretty rigorous, as you'd expect in a mathsy volume. However, it's pretty friendly - there are plenty of examples to help understanding, exercises set at a doable level, etc. The subject is abstract enough that there don't seem to be many proofs, but those that are present are straightforward. The exercises and examples do hint towards the underlying intuition, but the intuition is rarely explicitly revealed, even if only to explain why it may not work in the general case.
And the subject? Category theory is a funny one. It's objects and arrows, generally representing, in some sense, types and transformations between the types, although noone would be so crass as to restrict it to such concrete uses. 'Commutivity diagrams' are generally about doing the same operation in different domains, and whether you get the same results if you transfer between the domains before or after performing the transform. And certain unique arrows appear to be about doing the operation which destroys or preserves the most information, while fitting into some role.
Category theory is a fairly controversial subject in some people's view - so-called 'abstract nonsense'. Having read this book, I can't tell if it's helpful for providing fundamental insights, or is simply a way of obfuscating the obvious.
Permalink. Posted 22:39, Sun, 20 Dec 2009.
Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett
This is, I believe, the first really good, mid-sequence, Discworld novel. Terry has warmed up, it's a novel without Rincewind, and it's not about a generic fantasy world. It's about the theatre, psychology and the nature of truth. Kinda. The characters are excellent, the plot runs wonderfully, and every sentence is a joy to read. At this point, he's really on a roll, following up with Pyramids and Guards! Guards!. Happy, happy, joy, joy!
Permalink. Posted 22:12, Sun, 20 Dec 2009.
Sourcery - Terry Pratchett
I'm back to in-order reading of the Discworld novels, and this is another of my non-favourites. Since it's a Discworld novel, there's still plenty going for it - good jokes and good characters abound. My problems are more at the structural level.
At the highest level, I feel too much happens and is then undone. This is remarkably unsatisfying. Beneath that, the plot still focuses on trying to bring a system of magic to the Discworld, and make it its own place. A sourcerer being an eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son is all well and good, but it's still pushing the world towards a generic fantasy pastiche, rather than the entertaining and thought-provoking mirror to this world it becomes in later novels. It's another Rincewind novel, again providing this unfortunate feeling that he's the star, rather than the world.
I think if Terry wrote this novel after a few of the other books, he could have made it work a lot better. He'd have improved the balance, and have had the confidence and well-constructed world to really pull this off. As it is, it just underwhelms.
Permalink. Posted 22:08, Sun, 20 Dec 2009.
Mort - Terry Pratchett
Back to my in-order reading of the Discworld novels. Mort is, I'm afraid, not one of my favourites. It's still a bit of a warm-up novel, in the grand scheme of the billions he's written. It feels like he's still trying to work out what's a practical topic for a Discworld novel. To be honest, I'm not a great fan of the Death novels - he makes a nice walk-on character, but I don't think he works so well centre-stage. There are some fun bits to Mort, but it feels like it covers ground better matched by Wyrd Sisters and Reaper Man. This is not to say that it's a particularly bad book, but I'd put it more on par with Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun than most of the other Discworld novels.
Permalink. Posted 21:42, Thu, 19 Nov 2009.
Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett
There goes my in-order re-read of the Discworld books. With the birth of our son, I've had very limited reading time, and wanted something quite friendly and comforting. Guards! Guards! is one of my favourite Discworld novels, so that's what I homed in on. By this point in the sequence, Terry has really got into his stride. It's no longer about Rincewind and the wizards, but about the world instead. The characters are fantastic, the plot is fun and well-paced, and when you read it you realise there's pretty much a joke or two every paragraph, but it doesn't feel forced. Airplane crossed with Douglas Adams doesn't really do it justice, but it's a friendly, only slightly cynical, laugh-a-minute.
Permalink. Posted 21:36, Thu, 19 Nov 2009.
New Active Birth - Janet Balaskas
There are very few books I've read containing photographs of naked ladies, or manifestos, and this has both! 'Active birth' is what used to be called 'birth' before it gained the connotations of going to hospital, being fed a cocktail of drugs, and lying on your back. The 'new' in the title isn't 'new age', though - it's just the second edition.
So, Caroline's been planning to do the active birth thing. Her pregnancy has gone well, and currently doesn't seem to need to be medicalised. If it does, we will, but if intervention isn't necessary, this book makes a strong case for giving birth as naturally as possible, working with the body.
As I said, this book argues the case clearly and sincerely for 'active birth'. It's also practical, showing pre- and post-natal yoga exercises, birth positions etc. to allow for a more straightforward, less painful birth.
The book isn't perfect. It's a bit lumpily edited - I think this is the fault of the modifications to make the second edition. In some places it falls into making claims it can't justify, and going a little non-scientific, but it's generally been backed by plenty of references. Mentions of homeopathy undermine some of my feelings towards this book, but it does mention that kind of stuff only as part of a wider spectrum of treatments. I suppose I just have to accept that a lot of birth stuff can't really be double-blind tested! :p
...
Caroline has since given birth. Thanks to a combination of preparation, genetics, luck and great midwifery, she managed to do the whole birth process in five and a half hours, at home, with no pain relief except two paracetamol. Go active birth.
Permalink. Posted 23:23, Tue, 10 Nov 2009.
C# Essentials - Ben Albahari, Peter Drayton and Brad Merrill
It appears I am pretty conservative when it comes to programming languages for commercial use. I treated C++ as C with classes until 2005 or so, skipped the STL horrors of the '90s, and have been using Haskell for the last few years ('98 initially but we've been using extensions for the last couple of years... woo!). It is filtering through to me, though, that .NET is probably a fairly mature platform, after 10 or so years!
In contrast, this book was cutting edge. First published in early 2001, it's based on the .NET SDK beta! I bought it in 2003/2004 from a Galloway and Porter warehouse sale, as it was getting out of date at the time (I thought it'd make a good introduction to the basics), and it's been sitting on a shelf of mine since. As most of my work has either high-abstraction requirements (Haskell) or low-level requiremements (C++), C# and .Net has sat in a middleground that I've been ignoring, but it's a gap I should fill in, so fill in I should...
Essentially, the book tells me nothing architecturally that I haven't picked up already, and the details are probably out-of-date, but it's a short (180 lightweight pages) and straightforward introduction that I can probably use as a basic reference (steering me to the right place in online docs) for a while if I start bashing code out, until I get some kind of big new, shiny reference book on the subject. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a slightly rushed beta-technology O'Reilly book!
Permalink. Posted 11:50, Sat, 24 Oct 2009.
Leading Change - John P. Kotter
This looks suspiciously like one of those management BS books, that take you 200 pages to tell you what you already know. It could quite handily and effectively be dismissed as such, except that sometimes the obvious stuff still needs a little formalising, and the guy who wrote this is a bit of an expert.
I'll take a step back. What's this book about? It's about changing organisations. Duh. Interestingly, though, many failing organisations would rather go on failing in the same old way than address the obvious issue, and challenge themselves to do something about it. The difficulty of big change is always underestimated. So, most of this book is about engendering a sense of urgency, building up momentum, etc.
Moreover, the title is very deliberate. The author emphasises that change comes from 'leadership' - there being someone at the top with leadership and vision and strategy, and some goal beyond things ticking over. Kotter says most organisations are filled with managers, whose aims are to stabilise and standardise and generally control the situations - exactly what you need most of the time, but less useful in accurately steering your straight into a brick wall. He thinks leadership skills are not recognised and fostered enough.
If the book were only given to his apparent intended audience, only a few hundred copies would have been sold, as he seems to be aiming it at the CEOs of major international organisations. However, the ideas involved are relevant way down the chain, to any situation where things are broken and people are in denial.
Having said that, I think the book is still overly simplistic. While Kotter has much experience working with large companies to manage giant change processes, and has identified a process with a list of necessary steps towards huge change, it's not clear that the list is sufficient! Big change is difficult, and I don't think the book is a magic bullet.
Even with these flaws, I think it's an excellent book. It demonstrates the difference between management and leadership far better than anything else I've read, it puts office politics into perspective, and provides insight into what's going on up the management chain.
Permalink. Posted 22:42, Fri, 23 Oct 2009.
A History of Britain 1: 3000BC-AD1603 - Simon Schama
It's somewhat nice that Schama immediately addresses his subjectivity, with 'A', rather than 'The' in the title. The book really is a personalised trawl through history, but on the other hand it doesn't feel too twisting.
I'm really no history expert, though. Indeed, this is pretty much why I read the book - I've neglected the subject and felt I should at least catch up a little. As the truism goes, those who don't know history are bound to repeat it, and reading a little history seems a better incremental use of my time than reading more maths or computer science. Oh, and it's a little easier to read on the DLR in the morning.
The book is based on his TV series, and in a couple of places it shows, as the explanation is sometimes rather narrative, and the descriptions rather visual, but mostly it steers clear of TV stereotypes. In fact, I think the colour plates are the weakest feature of the book, being detached from the text and remarkably uninspiring.
So, while I can't comment on the quality of his historical interpretation, I can say it's a good, fun read that can help you understand the wider sweep of history in this country. Covering several thousand years in a few hundred pages, he can hardly do more than skim, but by a careful choice of people and big events Schama provides a good core narrative and dispel the occasional myth. It leaves me wanting to know more, and the bibliography is comprehensive, but somewhat overwhelming. Perhaps I'll just read volume two.
Permalink. Posted 22:24, Thu, 17 Sep 2009.
The Barnbrook Bible - Jonathan Barnbrook
The name really sums up the nature of this volume. It's chunky, and it covers an awful lot of Jonathan Barnbrook's output. To me, his best output is his fonts - Bastard, Exocet, Manson, Priori and the others, but that's just part of his work. His graphic design reacts to modern consumerism, and has an element of layered confusion, but in a way that contrasts very strongly with, say, The Designers Republic. Where TDR go for irony, Barnbrook goes for anger (and humour).
Barnbrook is a graphic designer with principles. He treats graphic design as a responsibility, in that it can be used to advertise good or bad causes, and he does not believe the graphic designer should be a transparent channel, but should choose what they work on. He's worked on projects with Damien Hirst, and has seen first-hand what 'artists' can get away with, which 'graphic designers' cannot. So, while there is plenty of graphic design content in the book, there's a strong theme of his views, too. It's a bit like Mark Thomas's comedy - the start of the book focuses on his early career, design work etc., but by the end of the book it has segued into a strong political message.
For someone who, in some ways, has a job of making visual candy, a simple wrapper for a message, Jonathan Barnbrook is really rather thoughtful. So, while it's a great book of graphic design, the volume is really lifted up by the notes, giving his motivation behind everything from the details of his fonts to his whole way of working.
Permalink. Posted 22:42, Mon, 17 Aug 2009.
What Style is it? - John C. Poppeliers and S. Allen Chambers Jr.
This book is a memento of our trip to the States late last year. We went on a trip with friends through North Carolina down to Georgia, and saw Charleston and Savannah. We had a fantastic time. They are rather lovely cities, and the architecture really makes the places. Hence I got this rather neat little guide to American architecture.
The book is effectively a side-effect of the US's federal program to manage their historic buildings, through their HABS (Historic American Buildings Survey) project. It also pointed me at the HABS website which has some wonderful resources (super-high resolution scans of photos of Fallingwater, anyone?). It contains a few pages on each of the styles of building, with photos, architectural drawings and a bit of text. There's a nice glossary at the back, and it all sits together rather well.
Moreover, while it's an introduction to American architecture, I think it sits well as a general introduction to styles of architecture. This is because American architecture is a magnifying lens. Styles done elsewhere are done... more so. In places, there's a real lack of restraints, which is all the better for demonstrating the salient points of a style! Moreover, when something's ugly, it's really ugly! All in all, I found it remarkably enjoyable, even if it's a somewhat dry exposition.
Permalink. Posted 22:25, Mon, 17 Aug 2009.
Combinatorial Algorithms - Donald L. Kreher and Douglas R. Stinson
A bit of a funny book, this. It discusses algorithms to do with combinatorics, as one might expect! It's a real grab-bag, though. It starts with things like subsets, permutations and partitions, and the counting and enumeration thereof. It then moves into various forms of heuristic search for problems with are otherwise exponential, and then goes weird, talking about algorithm for representing groups, isomorphisms on graphs, and basis reduction. It finishes off by showing a way to break the Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem system.
Reading through it, it feels like it's going all over the place, but at the end it feels like there's a structure - they wanted to write on a few advanced structures, but needed to build everything up first. The bits at the end get pretty hardcore. The full graph isomorphism stuff is pretty funky, and the chapter on basis reduction brings in LLL, albeit without really introducing it well.
I think this is the weakness of the book - it's just not presented well. There's a lot here, in the rambling path it takes, but mining it can be painful. This ranges from the ugly layout through to the awful pseudocode, through to the strangely ill-paced prose. There are some nice examples, but it's mixed in with an otherwise quite dodgy exposition. Admittedly I'm spoiled by the clarity of Cormen et al's Introduction to Algorithms, but even comparing this book to some maths texts, it's dodgy. It may not be as terse as those, but it's still a bit less readable.
Overall, it's still a good book. The topics are interesting, there are algorithms in here which'll save you effort if you're working on Project Euler, and it's challenging and different. I'm just disappointed by the presentation.
Permalink. Posted 23:32, Tue, 28 Jul 2009.
Quantum Theory For Beginners - J. P. McEvoy and Oscar Zarate
The 'for beginners' series, as well as the 'Bluffer's guide' seem to me to be the red squirrels to the transatlantic grey squirrels of the 'for dummies' and 'idiots guide to' series. The computer-free layout and bad cartoons add to their suspect charm.
I've not read any physics in ages, and when I came across this in a second-hand bookshop, I couldn't resist. It could have been very poor, especially with the magic handwaving that people associate with quantum. Instead, it's a remarkably readable and interesting introduction to the subject, which actually has some mathematical detail to it (not tonnes, but enough to keep up the interest).
The way it does this is by focusing on the historical development. This provides a narrative, and set of characters. The developing subject provides momentum, but also the fact that the subject was driven by unexplained physical phenomena keeps the exposition firmly rooted in physical reality, even if the mathematics is difficult to interpret physically.
In many ways, I think this is the perfect counterpart to Feynman's introductory QED book, coming at the subject in a completely different direction, and rounding out elementary, non-quantitative quantum very neatly.
Permalink. Posted 23:39, Mon, 27 Jul 2009.
Give Me Time - The Mind Gym
Having reasonably enjoyed 'Wake Your Mind Up', I had fairly high hopes for this book, which promises similar things, but in the area of time management. In many way, though, it felt like a bit of a rehash of the previous book, with not much fresh being brought in. The focus was explicitly on time, and the details are different, but the overall feeling was just... lacking anything novel.
The book's divided into lots of little chapters covering mini-topics, but basically the book splits into 'mental attitudes about feeling good about your time use, and hey! why not think about what you're spending your time on, from time to time?' and 'tips for making better use of your time'. The first section seemed, to me, pretty condescending (I want practical hints that help me get more done, please, not fluff!), and the second... pretty shallow. It's not bad, as such, just impressively un-earth-shattering. It's pretty much 'be organised, don't let people waste your time, don't over-commit, keep meetings focused... and learn to speedread!'. Er, cheers.
Permalink. Posted 23:25, Mon, 27 Jul 2009.
BP Portrait Award 2009
This little guidebook to the award is rather fun. We saw the exhibition on the same afternoon as the RA exhibition, and it was a lot of fun. It's a shame that the reproductions of the paintings, though high quality, are so small. At this scale, it's difficult to tell the difference between photo-realistic and just near-photo-realistic. Subtleties of style go away, and the differences between the egg tempura and oils disappears, despite being such a difference in the flesh.
Having said that, it's still a good record. Despite the lack of details of the execution in reduced form, most entries would also work effectively as photographic portraits, and it's a good reminder of what we saw on the day. There were some stunning pieces, with the best generally shying away a little from the most photo-like representation.
Having said that, we found the first place award a little odd. Mary Jane Ansell's work, to us, captured alienness far better than Peter Monkman's prizewinner. Hey ho, we're not the judges....
Permalink. Posted 23:05, Mon, 20 Jul 2009.
The Painter RAs - Dennis Toff
This book describes itself as 'A guide to the painter members of the Royal Academy of Arts with examples of their work'. That's pretty much it! We went along to the RA Summer Exhibition, and were a little disappointed. We're wondering if the credit crunch is really biting, as this year it felt like a lot more RAs were putting in as much as they could, trying to sell their wares at the expense of wallspace for non-RAs. Perhaps this is what happens if you go for a few years in a row, but there was an awful lot of repetition, and less in the way of fantastic surprises from unexpected quarters (althoug there were some unpleasant surprises - what Tracy Emin can get away with is still irritating :p ).
Having seen so much RA work from those really trying to sell their stuff, it seemed strangely tempting to get this book, which shows all the painters (more or less - some didn't seem to want to take part, but only a few). And it's quite good.
Hmmm. Perhaps I'm a little unfair on the exhibition. There were some pretty good bits. I love Gormley's Quantum Void VI, 2009 (albeit somewhat overpriced) and Mick Moon's Tree Line (which made the front cover of the catalogue). Caroline loved Bryan Kneale's Gemini, Dido Crosby's Raven and much of the architecture (she seems to appreciate the 3d side). It was also very odd to see Gothic Temple at Stowe, where we went on our honeymoon, feature in one of the photos - Liane Lang's Taking Liberties, we think.
Permalink. Posted 23:04, Mon, 20 Jul 2009.
There is also a complete index of the books.
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