Blink,
Malcolm Gladwell Laboured, but with interesting parts.
[more]
2005-05-01
The Origins of Virtue,
Matt Ridley Virtue isn't something that's a "nice to have" in a society: it's a necessary part of human evolution.
[more]
recommended
The Encyclopaedia of Cult Children's TV,
Richard Lewis At a certain point in life you spend a lot of time discussing children's TV, and this book becomes fascinating.
[more]
recommended
100 Ways to Live to 100,
Dr R. Henderson
"There is nothing more dull in this world than a health bore ...", but this is a book full of little bits of advice
but doesn't stop you eating lard if you want to. The emphasis is on living, not just staying alive.
[more]
recommended
JXTA in a Nutshell ,
Scott Oaks, Li Gong, Bernard Travaset
Handy hands-on introduction to JXTA, the peer-to-peer framework.
[more]
Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel ,
Scott Adams
Much like any of the other Dilbert business books, and I'm not going to be rushing out to buy any more of these.
[more]
Professional Apache Tomcat,
Chanoch Wiggers, Ben Galbraith, Vivek Chopra, Sing Li, Amit Bakore, Romin Irani, Debashish Bhattacharjee, Sandip Bhattacharya, Chad Fowler, Allan Liska, Ralph Gazdial For some reason I've managed to miss out on making use of Apache's Tomcat servlet engine. This is the guide that I used to catch up.
[more]
2002-11-01
American Gods,
Neil Gaiman
I'd classify this as "fantasy", and as such wouldn't normally read this kind of book. Other people
might classify it as "road trip".
[more]
Java 2D Graphics,
Jonathan Knudsen
Not the book for me. Might be for you if you need to be walked through every aspect of the Java 2D API.
[more]
Rescuing the Spectacled Bear,
Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry is not the man you'd send to rough it in South America, which makes this
book all the more fun.
[more]
2002-09-01
One Hit Wonderland,
Tony Hawks
Another bet, another travel adventure... this time to have a hit single anywhere, in any style.
[more]
Frank Skinner ,
Frank Skinner
Frank Skinner's autobiography. Reads like a stand up comedy routine.
[more]
McCarthy's Bar,
Pete McCarthy
Travelling around Ireland, meeting people, not really doing much really. A good read.
[more]
Last Chance to See,
Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine
I've always thought of this book as an environmentalist thing, which has put me off reading it for years. I've been an idiot for missing out for so long.
[more]
recommended
Asleep,
Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Michael Emmerich
"One of Japan's finest and most popular writers..." but I couldn't get into it.
[more]
The Salmon of Doubt,
Douglas Adams, Christopher Cerf (Editor)
Douglas Adams died in 2001, but here's a book from all the stuff they found on his Mac's hard drive.
[more]
recommended
Soloing,
Harriet Rubin
It's not about freelancing -- it's more than that. It's a whole life thing.
[more]
2002-04-01
The Stars' Tennis Balls,
Stephen Fry
For a long time I've been put off Stephen Fry's books by having a dull time trying
to read one of them (I forget which). Picked this one up as part of a 3 for 2 deal
and I'm glad I did.
[more]
Free as in Freedom,
Sam Williams
Can you get enough to read about Richard M. Stallman? Probably, anyway this is a biography of the man.
[more]
Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines,
Sun Microsystems
Someone once said that "the user interface is the product". Now I know this, I guess I need
to learn something more about UIs....
[more]
recommended
Learning Wireless Java,
Qusay Mahmoud
A trusty O'Reilly guide to programming for J2ME devices.
[more]
recommended
Crossing the Chasm,
Geoffrey A. Moore
"Marketing and selling technology products to mainstream customers".
[more]
2002-02-01
Learning Python,
Mark Lutz, David Ascher
I've heard good things about Python, so I thought I'd take a look.
[more]
Learning Oracle PL/SQL,
Bill Pribyl, Steven Feuerstein
I've had to dabble in PL/SQL on and off for a few years, but I'd now exhausted the limits of grabbing quick fixes from Google. Time to learn this stuff properly.
[more]
recommended
2002-01-01
Can You Tell What It Is Yet? ,
Rolf Harris
Rolf Harris has been on the TV for as long as I can remember, but I didn't know anything about him until I listened to his autobiography.
[more]
Eon,
Greg Bear
A piece of our own history comes back in time during the cold war, just before the bombs start falling.
[more]
All Families Are Psychotic,
Douglas Coupland
I've got into the habit of liking the way Coupland writes, so much so that I've now lost the ability to
say whether this book (this story) is good or not. "I enjoyed it very much", is about the best I can do.
[more]
recommended
Java and XSLT,
Eric M. Burke
The best text covering the use of XSLT from Java.
[more]
recommended
Professional Java Server Programming J2EE, 1.3 Edition ,
Subrahmanyam Allaramaju, Cedric Buest, Marc Wilcox, Sameer Tyagi, Rod Johnson, Gary Watson, Alan Williamson, John Davies, Ramesh Naggapan, Andy Longshaw, Dr P G Sarang, Tyler Jewell, Alex Toussaint
Big but packed with useful stuff. Tells you what you need to know.
[more]
recommended
Effective Java,
Josh Bloch
This is the book that makes you go "ahh" and then go running to you Java code to make some quick changes.
[more]
recommended
2001-04-01
Java Internationalization,
Andy Deitsch, David A. Czarnecki
Given that most people on the planet don't speak English I thought I should take some time
to learn how to use Java's internationalization features.
[more]
100 NZ Short Short Stories,
Graeme Lay
This book is the result of a 1996 competition to collect together the best short stories of roughly 500 words each (so that's
about one-and-a-half to two pages per story in this book). There's no particular theme, so the stories range
all over the place: funny, odd, sad, love, death.
[more]
XML in a Nutshell,
Elliotte Rusty Harold, W. Scott Means
This is the book I have to hand when doing any tricky XML, XSL stuff.
[more]
recommended
The Predictors,
Thomas Bass
The true story of how chaos pioneers, Doyne Farmer and Norman Packard, applied learning algorithms to crack the world's financial markets. Apparently it all works and they're making lots of money.
[more]
2001-01-01
Planning Extreme Programming,
Kent Beck, Martin Fowler
How to plan, estimate, spec and run projects with extreme programming.
[more]
recommended
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone,
J.K. Rowling, Stephen Fry (Narrator)
Almost everyone who mentioned Harry Potter to me also described it as a great read. I tried to get into it,
but I couldn't make it past the first two chapters. It didn't hold
my interest. But the audio version is a very different experience.
[more]
2000-12-01
Anvil of Stars,
Greg Bear
Kids in space to avenge the death of the Earth. Lovely stuff.
[more]
2000-11-01
Down Under,
Bill Bryson
It's a Bill Bryson book. If you like any of his previous books, you'll probably like this one.
[more]
recommended
Lonely Planet: New Zealand,
Jeff Williams, Christine Niven
A useful guide for my brief "make it up as you go along" visit to NZ, but with hindsight I
wouldn't have used the book.
[more]
2000-10-01
Playing the Moldovans at Tennis,
Tony Hawks
Looks like Tony Hawks has started a new career as a serial dare-taker with a hint of travel writing. Can't be
long before he takes a film crew with him and turns one of these dares into a TV series. And I'd probably watch.
[more]
recommended
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,
Edward R. Tufte
It's too easy to gush about this book. The topic is how to display data to get the information across
in the most honest and useful way. To tell that, you learn some history, see some very creative
graphics and also see some very bad graphics.
[more]
recommended
Anti-patterns: Refactoring software, architectures
and projects in crisis,
William Brown, Raphael Malveau, Hays McCormick III, Thomas Mowbray
Someone said "you learn more from your mistakes than successes". I believe that, so I couldn't resist this book. I've read (well, own) the
patterns book which gives me a collection of coding frameworks or approaches that
have worked before. So I had to look at Anti-Patterns for the list of things which don't work.
[more]
recommended
2000-09-01
The Forge of God,
Greg Bear
No messing around: page 6, Europa goes missing. Page 18, alien found.
[more]
recommended
The Old Man and the Sea,
Hemmingway
I didn't read this for the
story. I read it because it is supposed to be a classic book. And it
is.
[more]
Blast From the Past,
Ben Elton Loved the start, loved all the twists and
turns at the end.
[more]
Refactoring,
Martin Fowler
You try to write the best code you can, but you can't predict the future and when you go back to some
code it has "gone off" and you need to change it (it works, but you can't live with it anymore). You need to refactor.
[more]
recommended
2000-07-01
Bernice Bobs Her Hair,
F. Scott Fitzgerald / The Divine Comedy
"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is a track on Divine Comedy's Liberation album.
The lyrics sounded so obviously like a novel, I had to go track it down.
[more]
Eyewitness Travel Guide to San Francisco & Northern California,
I've never bought an Eyewitness guide before. They've always seemed lacking in information and just overly glossy. More
tourist then traveler. Then I realized that I rarely read all of a 1000 page travel guide.
[more]
Lonely Planet: California & Nevada,
I've recently found myself preferring the Lonely Planet guides over my old favourites, the Rough Guides.
Does this mean I'm getting old or something?
[more]
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping,
Paco Underhill It's like the usability of shopping. I don't know how seriously to take this particular science, but it's a great read.
[more]
recommended
2000-05-01
Miss Wyoming,
Douglas Coupland His best one yet. If you like that kind of thing. Don't know?
Try the first few paragraphs...
[more]
recommended
EXtreme Programming EXplained,
Kent Beck I want to believe. I really do. I'm almost there: lots of testing, yes.
Refectoring, yes. The simplest thing that works, yes. No to big methodologies.
Pair programming, yes... but all the time? What about teleworking?
[more]
recommended
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