Category: books

programming books and videos

We’re snowed in today here in my part of NJ, so today’s probably a good day to review and clean up some of the “independent study” stuff I’ve been working on over the last several months.

First, I decided to finally finish up a book that I started reading about a year ago, Real-World Functional Programming. I’d been reading it a little bit at a time for quite a while. I started in on a program to learn F# back in 2014. I read a few books, and learned a bit, but I never really got a chance to apply any of that knowledge on a practical project. So I skimmed through the last couple of chapters of that book today, marked it as “read” in Goodreads, and decided that my F# experiment is over for now.

I started (and finished) reading a book on JavaScript this week, Object-Oriented JavaScript. I’m doing a bit of JavaScript programming at work right now, but I’m rusty, since I haven’t used it much lately. I got this book for free at some point from Packt, so I thought maybe it would be a good way to brush up and refresh my memory. It was a good refresher, and even had some stuff in it that I hadn’t stumbled across before.

On the video front, I’m still working my way through SharePoint videos on Pluralsight. I’ve completed Andrew Connell’s “SharePoint 2013 Developer Ramp-Up” series, and Sahil Malik’s “Understanding SharePoint 2013” series. Now I’m working on David Mann’s “Developing SharePoint 2013 Solutions with JavaScript,” which is helping me out with the SharePoint/JavaScript stuff that I’m currently working on. When I paid for a year’s worth of Pluralsight, I wasn’t sure if I’d get my money’s worth out of it, but I think I’ve been making good use of it so far this year.

I’ve also now been sidetracked into messing around with TypeScript. I read a book on CoffeeScript a few years back, but CoffeeScript never really took off (at least in the .NET community), while TypeScript seems to be very popular right now. (Take a look at this Google Trends graph.) So I’ve been experimenting with using TypeScript and JSOM together in a SharePoint project. I’m not sure if it’s worth the effort, but it’s interesting. I haven’t devoted too much time to TypeScript yet, but I’ll probably watch a Pluralsight video or two on it and see if I can persuade myself into using it.

Finally, I feel like I should get back to Ruby on Rails at some point. I started learning Ruby back in 2015, and learned the basics (of both the Ruby language and the Rails framework) but really didn’t get as far as I wanted. I got partway through Michael Hartl’s book/tutorial, but I guess I got off track at some point, since I haven’t touched it since June 2015. As with F#, I never had any real project in mind, or work-related reason to learn Ruby, so I probably abandoned it in favor of something else I needed to learn.

So I guess I’ve got some goals for the rest of 2017: keep working on SharePoint, brush up on my JavaScript some more, look into TypeScript more deeply, and maybe get back to Ruby on Rails, if I have time.

The Book of Dust

I was pretty excited to find out this week that Philip Pullman will be releasing the first volume of his new trilogy in October of this year. The trilogy isn’t exactly a sequel to His Dark Materials, but it’s in the same universe, and features some of the same characters. More details can be found at NPR and The Guardian.

I read His Dark Materials back in 2004, starting in January and finishing in June. I remember it well, since I was reading it when my brother passed away, in February 2004, so those memories are linked together in my head. It was also the first time I read anything substantial in ebook form. (I was reading it with Microsoft Reader on a Toshiba Pocket PC. It wasn’t a horrible experience, but neither was it a good one, and I never did buy anything else to read on that device.)

At some point in 2010, I think, I bought a trade paperback of the trilogy, with the idea that I’d reread it eventually. (Of course, the Pocket PC was long gone by then, along with the DRM’d ebooks that were tied to it.) I still haven’t gotten around to rereading it, but I’m thinking about it again.

I could just go ahead and start into the trade paperback, or I could listen to the audio version of Golden Compass, which I seem to have bought via iTunes in 2007 and forgotten about. Or I could buy the graphic novel version of Golden Compass, which I didn’t know about until I started poking around on Amazon tonight. So, plenty of options.

I’m kind of curious as to how I’d process the books right now. I think I’m a different person than I was in 2004. Am I capable of enjoying them as much as I did the first time through? Would I find new things in them that went over my head the first time? Would reading certain sections trigger specific memories? I don’t know. I’m usually not big on rereading books. There are just so many that I haven’t read yet, and I’m such a slow reader these days. But rereading these books would probably be worth my time.

Art and Literature for Troubled Times

OK, that post title might be a little pretentious. But I’ve been seeing a lot of stuff on the internet over the last month about art and literature, with relation to “our current political/cultural situation,” and enough of it is interesting to me that I thought I’d toss together a post.

I’ve previously mentioned Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.” And of course 1984 has gotten a lot of attention. (And, speaking of Orwell, a school in Connecticut has removed Animal Farm from their curriculum, right when we need it the most.)

WNYC this week has been asking people to post about their current reading & watching habits on Twitter, using the hashtag #CulturePack. That’s gotten some interesting responses, in the areas of relevant non-fiction, relevant fiction, and pure escapism. (One popular answer is Harry Potter books and movies, which I think falls into both the relevant and escapism categories, if you think about it.)

The New Yorker just published an article called The Books We’re Turning to Now, which I haven’t read yet, but should be interesting.

Going a little further down the road of dystopian fiction, William Gibson’s The Peripheral has been mentioned a lot lately. Gibson himself has compared the current administration to the concept of the klept from his book. The Peripheral is actually the only Gibson novel I haven’t read yet. (I should fix that soon.)

And to work a little black humor into all of this, here’s a comic strip about how 2017 is looking a lot like a 1990’s cyberpunk dystopia. Speaking as someone who read a fair amount of cyberpunk in the 90s, this is pretty accurate.

Meanwhile, on the art front, MoMA is hanging some works by Muslim artists to protest Trump’s entry ban. This seems like a pretty minor thing to do, but it’s important, in a way, and it’s appropriate, for a museum. MoMA’s exhibit Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter is relevant too, but just closed. Maybe they should have kept that going for a few more months.

As for me, I’ve been reading The New York Times and The New Yorker a lot lately. Though I’m not just reading the “current events” stuff: I’ve also been reading long-form stuff, digging into older articles on art, literature, and what-not. (And, yeah, I know that makes me sound like a typical East Coast liberal. Guilty as charged, I guess.)

For escapism, I’m still reading a lot of the DC Rebirth comics. I keep trying to talk myself into dropping one or more of the ones I’m buying regularly, but I haven’t managed to do that yet. They’re all still pretty good and worth reading.

Philip Roth on Trump

Coincidentally, after reading a fairly old New Yorker article about Philip Roth over the weekend, and blogging about it, I saw today that the New Yorker reached out to Roth for comment on Trump, and any similarity between the Trump administration and the fictional Lindbergh administration from his novel “The Plot Against America.” He has a few interesting things to say, though nothing particularly unexpected.

I’m still curious about “The Plot Against America.” I’m going to have to pick it up and read it at some point.

Almost Enough Art

I was reading this article about Philip Roth this morning, and a couple of lines jumped out at me.

First, this one from a letter from Saul Bellow:

There’s almost enough art to cover the deadly griefs with. Not quite, though. There are always gaps.

And the other, from Roth’s character Zuckerman, in his novel Exit Ghost:

It’s a flexible instrument that we’ve inherited. It’s amazing how much punishment we can take.

(I found this line also quoted in a short essay by Greil Marcus from 2007, which is a good read today, for perspective.)

I’m presenting these lines without much context, but hopefully, you get the idea. (And not the wrong idea. I’m not currently experiencing any “deadly griefs.”) Anyway, It occurs to me that I should really give Philip Roth a try. I’ve never quite gotten up the energy to choose one of his novels over, say, a nice Star Trek novel or Batman comic. Maybe I should start with something like The Plot Against America. I do generally like alternate history novels, though I’d imagine there’s going to be some difference between Harry Turtledove and Philip Roth.

Goodreads reading challenge

I set a goal of 50 books in my Goodreads reading challenge last year, and read 79 total. A lot of them were comics, and some of the non-comics stuff wasn’t exactly novel-length though. But it’s still a good amount of reading.

I set this year’s goal at 50 books again. My main purpose in reading this year will, I think, be “brief distraction from feelings of impending doom.”

I actually haven’t read a regular old novel in a while, possibly since October. I’ve been reading a lot of comics over the past few months. I’m not quite sure what I want to read next. One of my friends has recommended Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, which I’d heard about before and have been meaning to pick up. So that’s a possibility. I also have three unread Star Trek novels on my Kindle, though, so maybe that would make a good start for 2017.

Cyber Monday

I couldn’t quite talk myself into signing up for a Pluralsight subscription today, even at the $200 Black Friday rate, but I did convince myself to plunk down $15 for the Humble / O’Reilly Unix bundle that’s running right now. (Not technically a Black Friday or Cyber Monday deal, but it’s in the right date range.)

Over a dozen classic O’Reilly books for $15: not a bad deal. Most of the books are pretty old, but many of them are still useful. I’m not sure if the sed & awk book or the lex & yacc book are of any use at this point, but the vi/Vim and Emacs books could be. And bash is still useful. I have a few of these in hard copy form, but it’ll be nice to have PDF copies of them. I imagine I could actually throw out some of my older O’Reilly books at this point. I think I have a first edition of the Unix Power Tools book floating around here somewhere, for instance. That’s a pretty thick book, and there’s really no reason I need it anymore, except maybe as a doorstop. (Thinking about it a bit more, I guess most of these books are available through the Safari subscription I get through ACM, but it can’t hurt to have offline, DRM-free, copies.)

I also convinced myself to buy a few comics from Dark Horse, from their Black Friday sale (most books for 99 cents), and a few collections from Comixology (from DC’s buy one get one free sale). In both cases, I was buying stuff that I missed from the period where I’d pretty much stopped buying comics (2009-2015, roughly).

I should probably be slightly embarrassed that I only bought stuff for myself this weekend, but I don’t really have any need to do any significant Christmas shopping for anyone else. And that can all get done online, whenever.

Bananapocalypse

Here’s a good article on the possibility of a coming bananapocalypse. It sounds kind of funny, but it’s a real problem.

The world’s most popular fruit, the Cavendish banana, is also one of the least genetically diverse. These seedless bananas destined for the $11 billion export market are, essentially, clones. That leaves the humble Cavendish vulnerable to diseases that can take advantage of its limited genetic diversity.

I eat a banana almost every day, so it would really bother me if they disappeared, but of course that’s a “first-world problem.” I’d just eat more of something else, and get on with my life. In some parts of the world, bananas are a staple and an important source of nutrition.

All of this seems to be leading up to a world much like the one presented in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. Let’s hope we don’t actually let it go that far. (Which reminds me: I need to read more Paolo Bacigalupi.)

Amazon Prime Reading

Amazon seems to be rolling out a bunch of random stuff to Prime members lately. I blogged about Audible Channels last week. Now, they’ve started up something called Amazon Prime Reading. This is a service that lets Prime members read a variety of books, comics, and magazines for free.

This is distinct from the Kindle Owners Lending Library, which is available only to Kindle owners, and doesn’t require Prime membership. And from Kindle Unlimited, which lets you read an unlimited number of books (from a broad but still somewhat limited selection) for $10 per month (including audiobooks). And also from Kindle First, which lets Prime members “buy” one book per month for free from a selection of six or so new releases. It’s all very confusing.

I’ve used the Kindle “lending library” once or twice. It’s not easy to find books that are part of that program, and there’s not really much of a selection. I’ve been getting a book from Kindle First every month since the program launched, but, until recently, had just been letting them pile up. I decided to read a few recently, and I was pleasantly surprised. There are some pretty good books in there. (There’s probably a lot of dreck too, but I haven’t hit any yet.) I’ve never been tempted to sign up for Kindle Unlimited. I already “own” plenty of ebooks that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, so there’s no reason to pay a subscription fee to get access to more.

So I guess it’s a good thing that there are more and more ways to get access to free reading material. But I’ve got plenty to read, regardless. Looking at Goodreads, I see that I’ve got 179 books currently tagged as “to read.” That ought to be enough to keep me busy for quite a while.