I would like to call this the best second book on R, except that I wouldn’t know what the first one would be. I learned R from classes and tutorials about 10 years ago, used it on my PhD and four articles, and use it today on a daily basis at work; yet only now, […]
Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests by Steve Freeman I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up this book. In spite of its excellent reviews I feared it was going to be another redundant addition to the mountain of books harping on the virtues of Test-Driven Development (TDD), without adding anything significant to […]
RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson My rating: 5 of 5 stars I began reading “Restful web services” while researching technical solutions for Neurobat Online, the web service version of our intelligent heating controller. Prior to this, most (all?) web service projects I had been involved in were based on SOAP. REST is a heavily […]
Linkers and Loaders by John R. Levine My rating: 4 of 5 stars You may have written hundreds, maybe thousands of programs, but if you are like most programmers then everything that happens after the compilation is kind of mysterious. Why does the compiler have to create object files? What are they? What is this […]
I began reading Ken Schwaber’s ‘Agile Project Management with Scrum’ for two reasons: 1) it’s a book about Scrum, and 2) it’s from Ken Schwaber, one of the fathers of Scrum. Having now read it, I think these are the only reasons I don’t entirely regret reading it. The book is a series of case […]
I’ve read Thomas Friedman’s “Hot, Flat and Crowded”, and firmly believe this book belongs on the shelf of anyone involved in making buildings more energy-effective. Mr Friedman’s previous bestseller, “The World is Flat”, discussed the changes to our world that enabled more and more people to participate in a global economy. “Hot, Flat and Crowded” […]
This week I started reading Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen, the well-known book on presentation design and guidelines. (I’ve borrowed it from our library after waiting for something like 9 months. There were about 10 reservations before mine, so I guess it must be popular.) On page 61 there’s a nice list of questions one should […]
I just finished reading through Decompiling Java by Godfrey Nolan. You might ask, why would I mention a book on reverse-engineering bytecode in a weblog dedicated to smart buildings? What is the relationship between the intellectual property of companies writing Java code and home automation? The answer, essentially, is OSGi. An OSGi framework, in a […]