Agylen

Joel Spolsky: “The management training program we’re starting up here at Fog Creek will take about three years and will be relatively intensive. Among other things, there will be a required reading list consisting of about 75 books (we’re working on the theory here of one book every two weeks)”

Interesting book list. Personally I’ve read ten of them:

• The Mythical Man-Month.
• Don’t Make Me Think.
• Design for Community.
• The Non-Designer’s Design Book.
• The Pragmatic Programmer.
• Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering.
• Peopleware.
• The Secrets of Consulting.
• Crossing the Chasm.
• The Tipping Point.

All of them are great books, so I think the same can probably be said of the others on the list.

Plus, I have The Search on order at Amazon, so I think I am well equipped to apply for the Fog Creek Software Management Training Program

Foundations of Ajax, by Ryan Asleson, Nathaniel T. Schutta — Apress.

The Ajax phenomenon is quite new — even though the underlying technologies have been around for years — but in a few months it’s already become mainstream. It’s still in the early-adopters, pre-oreilly-book phase, but some books are already starting to appear. Kudos to Apress for being able to publish a quality product so early.

This is really a foundations book, as the title says. It does a good job of explaining the underpinnings of Ajax, even though the initial chapter on the history of the Internet could have been edited out without much harm. It explains very plainly and clearly the basic Ajax techniques and presents a good overview of some of the best tools available to the Ajaxan craftsman.

Being an introductory text, you can’t really blame the authors for not going too deep into the most complex technical and architectural issue. However, if you already tried doing some simple Ajax applications, there’s not much here that you haven’t probably already read somewhere else. To be honest, there’s a good number of hints, tips, and tricks and many pitfalls are dutifully pointed out, but you are left wondering whether there a more systematic approach wouldn’t have been better suited.

This is the main defect of the book, in my opinion. It feels rather disorganized at times. There just doesn’t seem to be a linear progression from the basic to the more complex issues. Some subjects are barely skimmed over whereas for others (the Venkman debuggers for instance) there’s even too much detail.

In particular, the final chapter on Ajax frameworks would have been great if it hadn’t dedicated just a few lines to each framework.

If it were not for this, I would have given “Foundations of Ajax” a five-star rating. As it stands, it’s only four.

The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky

The blurb on the back cover reads:

At my own company, we instituted a policy: we only want to hire software developers who can write, and write well. Just try submitting a résumé to me with grammatical errors or a cover letter that reads like it was written by that guy who translates those instruction manuals for really cheap consumer electronics. I dare you.

I think this is a great policy. Being able to communicate well is one of the greatest and most overlooked assets to look for in good software developers. With this book, Joel Spolsky shows us some of the best examples of good writing in the field of software.

If it were just a matter of good writing style, the importance of this book would be rather limited. But its real value, besides the stylistic aspect, is the great content. Most articles are not just well written, but also very interesting, insightful or outrightly funny. Great content in a nice package.

I’ve previously referred to Paul Graham’s essay “Great Hackers”, which is one of the best. My other favorites are Ken Arnold’s “Style is Substance” and why the lucky stiff‘s introduction to the Ruby language.

My only small gripe with the book is the fact that most, if not all, the material inside is already available on the net. It sure is pleasant having it all nicely collected and printed in a book, so that you can read it on the plane or at the beach, but I find it quite improbable that all good software writing can be found on the net and none in print magazines and book. Or maybe it is simply easier to obtain republishing rights for online material than it is for printed stuff? A couple of comic strips seem quite out of place, too.

Apart from these minor details, a very entertaining and stimulating read. Highly recommended.

I might be treading on dangerous waters by reviewing Tom Friedman’s latest book “The World is Flat” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0374292884) instead of the usual computer books. I am no economy or geopolitics expert, so I might be flamed for writing something really stupid, but after all this is my blog, so I’m allowed to say anything i like, right?

First of all, I liked the book. Not as much as “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”, which I found more varied and lively, but still I think it’s a very interesting and stimulating book.

I also do not agree with some of the critics, who pointed out that the world is still round and that there are many inequalities yet. To say so is to overlook the fact that Friedman himself admits (p.375: “Indeed, this is the point in the book where I have to make a confession: I know that the world is not flat.”) the same.

The one point where, in my opinion, Friedman downplays the risks to the flattening of the world that are brought by globalization itself, is when he talks about the impending energy crisis caused by the growing of China’s, India’s and Russia’s economy (“Too Many Toyotas”). He dedicates too little space to this problem and it is obvious that he has no real solutions to propose. But on the other hand, who has them?

As a geek and Open Source advocate, I obviously appreciate the importance given to Open Source as one of the “ten flatteners”. I would just like to object to the statement that “In 1991 [...] Linus Torvalds [...] posted his Linux operating system to compete with the Microsoft Windows operating system.” In 1991, Windows was at version 3.0: not much more than a graphical shell on top of MS-DOS and nowhere near complete dominance of the desktop market. We all know that Linus wrote Linux because he wanted a free Unix-like operating system to play with and Tanenbaum did not want too release Minix for free. I don’t think the existence of Windows played any role in this.

Apart from these minor critiques, I recommend “The World is Flat” to anyone wishing to understand where this world is going. You might not agree with everything that Friedman says here, but it will surely give you much food for thought.

Today’s meme is: Indicate which books from Time’s list of top 100 English-language novels from 1923 to the present you have read. Since English is not my mother tongue, I must be forgiven if my list isn’t as complete as someone else’s.

• Animal Farm
• The Big Sleep
• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Confessions of Nat Turner
• The Crying of Lot 49
• The French Lieutenant’s Woman
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• Herzog
• Lolita
• Lord of the Flies
• The Lord of the Rings
• Neuromancer
• 1984
• On the Road
• Ragtime
• Snow Crash
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

Two Pynchon’s and two Orwell’s. I don’t know if that means something.

To my personal list, I would surely add “The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, “High Fidelity” by Nick Hornby and something by Robert Heinlein, Tom Wolfe (“The Bonfire of Vanities”) and Tom Robbins. Not exactly classics, though, but neither “Neuromancer” nor “Snow Crash” are.

(Via Andrew)

Steve Loughran: “But wait a minute, check out those reviews. Every single one of the 5* reviewers calls it ‘ANT’, not ‘ant’, and is so full of unqualified praise you’d think this is the best contribution to Java literature ever. Yet these people have never reviewed anything else, except for some who do nothing but praise a single publisher, or cross-link to it.”

Thankfully, Amazon has put in place some methods for countering this type of behavior. If you see a “Report this” link beneath an obviously fake review, click on it and, assuming you have an account at Amazon.com, a report asking to take down the review as inappropriate will be sent to them. I guess that if enough people do this, we’ll soon see those reviews disappear.

It’s sad that a publisher like Virtualbookworm is engaging in these slimy tactics. Well, I guess they went a little too far in committing to the mission statement that is written on their homepage:

This means we are truly dedicated to the success of our authors!

Update: The saga continues. Far from being ashamed of their own behavior, those slimeballs are reaching new lows like copying the single honest and negative review they got and pasting it as if it were a review of every other Ant book on Amazon, as can be demonstrated here. Fucking spammers!

Update [Aug. 14]: Looks like Amazon took care of this, as all fake reviews (together with the only true one, unfortunately) on all books by A.T. Bell have been removed. I had also emailed Virtualbookwork.com about this and they were kind in replying promptly that is not their policy to post fake reviews and they would have investigated whether it was one of the authors. I’ll give them the benefit of doubt, even though there are other suspicious cases on Amazon yet, like books having seven or eight 5-star reviews by anonymous reviewers.