shesafish

	Sunday, February 02, 2003

 Book Lists

This book list is too enticing to delete from my aggregator. The quote below is not a direct one - I deleted a couple of titles on .NET (if you are curious take a look at the original). Also, I shamelessly added some links using my amazon-associates id. Enjoy. 

What's in Ted's bookbag?.

Not too long ago, a DevelopMentor buddy of mine dropped me an email asking what it was I was reading these days. (He'd briefly glanced through the stack of books I always carry around with me and was either impressed or suffering from insomnia, I'm not sure which at this point.) Since this is a question that comes up every so often at classes and from conference attendees, I figured I'd answer in the weblog and keep it simple that way. So, what's in Ted's bookbag?

• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture -- Martin Fowler, Addison-Wesley. Fowler is probably the only "patterns" guy to have emerged unscathed back into the "practical" world richer for the experience and not saddled with the "weirdo abstract thinker" label that dogs so many of the patterns writers. PEAA is a great book, and I particularly love his description of the performance characteristics of the average distributed object model: "Do I just say out and out that this design sucks like an inverted hurrican and get shown the door immediately?" (p. 87) Definite required reading, and hopefully a useful companion to go with my own Effective Enterprise Java, when it ships.
• Transaction Processing -- Gray and Reuter, Morgan Kaufman. This is THE bible on transactional processing, and although it's a bit dated (copyright 1993!), if you stick to the abstract discussion and sort of gloss over the code fragments (it's all "C" code written against libraries similar to those provided by Tuxedo and other TM systems), it's a tremendously useful and insightful work into how transactional software is supposed to make life better. This book is research material for Effective Enterprise Java.
• Programming Windows Security -- Brown, Addison-Wesley. This is the canonical reference for understanding how security in the Win32 environment works. I'm reading it as background material for teaching the Essential .NET Security class, as well as for writing an Essential Java Security class.
• Hacking Exposed, 3rd Edition -- author, publisher. Again, more background research for the security class(es).
• Applied Cryptography, 2nd Edition -- Bruce Schneier, publisher. I'm focusing entirely on the first part of the book (the exchange protocols) and more or less leaving all of the crypto discussions to folks I know and trust who actually groove on that sort of higher-order mathematics.
• Garbage Collection -- Jones and Lim, Wiley. This is one of those books you read to learn about both Java and .NET at the same time. Since both environments make use of automatic storage management, learning more about garbage collection seems an easy way to get a leg up on both spaces.
• Introduction to Database Systems, 7th Edition -- C.J. Date, Morgan Kaufman. Date is, along with Codd, one of the pioneers of relational thought and the RDBMS, and easily one of the more practiced thinkers on relational theory. I'm finding his viewpoints on relational systems to be enlightening, even if I don't necessarily agree with all of them. What fascinates me about this book, however, is how neatly he ties together almost every single element in SQL into a neat package by establishing some simple rules up front about how this relational expression language should work. Since XML and XPath seem to have a distant kinship to relational data schemes and SQL, I'm wondering if there's not some room to exploit in the XML space based on Date's writings about relational algebra and predicate calculus.

So there you go, the answer to that burning question, "What's in Ted's bookbag?" Naturally, I switch between books and/or topics on a regular basis, but these are what's been in the bookbag pretty consistently for the past couple of weeks now.

[The Mountain of Worthless Information]

1:22:02 PM  comment [] | Topics: programming_books 

 Television Cessation

I am on a DIY tv cessation plan.

Step 1: About a month ago I unsubscribed from HBO. That was a pretty passive step, it was more like AT&T unsubscribed me from HBO. Had I chosen to keep HBO I would've had to trade in a small converter box for a digital cable box and I never bothered. Also, The Sopranos season finale had aired, (Joey Pants had already been decapitated) so there was no uncomfortable withdrawal. When Six Feet Under and The Wire start up it may get a little more painful.

Step 2: The next step is to downgrade from Expanded Basic Cable to plain-old Basic Cable. This means no more CNN, ESPN, Bravo, Nickelodian, USA Network, TBS, TNT, and American Movie Classics. Wouldn't you know it, both the AT&T website and the customer service line provide plenty of automated ways to upgrade your subscription, but no way to downgrade.

Step 1.5: As an intermediate step I unplugged the tv power cord from the outlet. It sounds pretty lame but it makes a difference. Several times I've had the impulse to grab the remote and click the on button, but the task of plugging in the power cord is a reminder that I am on the cessation plan.

I am really tempted to cheat right now which is pathetic.  Please don't laugh.

1:29:30 AM  comment [] |