Dr.Atul Gawande is one amazing dude. Let us deviate for a moment to see what his biography on the book sleeve says:

Atul Gawande is the author of The Checklist Manifesto, Better and Complications. He is also a MacArthur Fellow, a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, he also leads the World Health Organization’s Safe Surgery Saves Lives program.

How can one person do all that ? He must be The Dude.

I haven’t read Better and Complications but both books have good reviews on Amazon. However, The Checklist Manifesto falls short of expectations set by the author’s previous achievements. The reason for this is that the book’s message is really thin – checklists are good, they can even save lives. The book is full of anecdotes from the author’s life. It is fun to read those anecdotes but in the back of my mind I kept looking for the author’s insight into creating a good checklist or a sample of one he made or any other kind of advice. But the book just kept on making cases to prove that having a checklist is good and they work (especially in the context of medical profession).

One of the strength of the book is the excellent writing style of the author.

Tangentially this book is an eye opener regarding the working of the surgery room and emergency room in hospitals. Things could go wrong in hundreds of ways. Dr.Atul sums it up very well in his book with this:

we (medical care professionals) are as apt to harm as we are to heal

I also respect him in writing about a surgery he did when the patient almost died because of his “fault”. It requires great strength to admit one’s mistake.

Bottom line is that this book is worth reading for people in medical profession (although checklists could useful in a lot of other situations, this book is probably most useful for medical professionals). I would rate the book 3 out of 5 and would recommend reading Better and Complications.

If you program for the .NET framework you need this book. It helps to take your debugging skills (as well as understanding of the platform) to the next level. How many times in the past have we tried to nail down a particularly tricky bug, and after hours (or days) of pulling at your hair, given up in despair and doubted our worth as a good programmer ? Well, if you have trodden down that path, then I am sure this book will help. I wish to warn you that this is not a book for a beginner nor for the faint-hearted. It will show you the tools, it will show you the way, but you will have to walk that path which begins by buying this book and reading it.

If you already have Advanced Windows Debugging by the same author and have read it, then you should be in good shape to tackle this one. But if you haven’t, fear not, you can still make it.

The book is soft-bound, neatly printed in about 500 pages and contains 10 chapters divided into 3 parts. It doesn’t weight much and can be easily carried around.

Part 1 consists of 3 chapters. In the first chapter the reader is an introduction to the tools. The 2nd chapter – CLR fundamentals – contrary to its name, is not a high level overview for the newbie. Instead it is a wealth of information for all .NET programmers. No matter how senior a programmer you are, I will bet that you will still learn something (probably a lot) from this chapter. The 3rd chapter – Basic Debugging Tasks – is a bit lengthy (I don’t mean that in a bad way) at about 100 pages, helps you get acquainted with the tools and commands.

Part 2 consists of 4 chapters – Assembly Loader, Managed Heap and Garbage Collection, Synchronization and Interoperability. As you might guess from the names, it is pretty advanced. It is hard, but you will emerge with a much better and clearer understanding of the platform. The chapter on interoperability might not be useful for everybody, but for those who have felt the pain of COM interop or PInvoke this chapter pays for the price of the book many times over.

Part 3 consists of the advanced-advanced topics. There is a chapter named Postmortem debugging which includes debugging problems when you have no access to the live machine and you cannot reproduce the problem locally. It consists of taking a dump file and analyzing it off-site. Not an everyday topic for most programmers, but you will surely be thankful for this chapter if you ever come across it. It also explains how the Windows error reporting works. The second last chapter is called PowerTools which includes discussion of PowerDbg which allows you to control native debuggers using powershell (how cool is that !). There is also information on Visual Studio integration with SOS and on CLR Profiler. The last chapter, a small one at about 15 pages, is on .NET 4.0 (based on Beta 1 release though).

The writing style is very clear and precise. There are plenty of samples and some good diagrams to help your understand the concepts better (i loved them, a picture is worth a thousand words). In short, this is book worth purchasing and worth reading and worth reading again (which is what I am going to do).

There is a support website for the book here.

It has been a long time since I got excited about a programming book as much as I did with Programming F#. I have all the books on F# available in the market today. But I should say that this is the best book for learning F# if you have no experience with functional programming. I am not sure how this book would be for a person who is totally new to programming (chances are they would find this ahead of their curve). But for a person who has good experience with imperative programming this book would get you up and running with F# in specific and functional programming in general.

The book by Don Syme Expert F# (Expert’s Voice in .Net) (who invented F#) is also good but not as good as Programming F# for new functional programmers. But once you have read this book, Don Syme’s book might be a good follow up.

The strongest point of this book is the clarity with which concepts are explained and the choice of good examples to explain a concept. They are concise and to the point. It also made the book surprisingly small (at a little less than 400 pages). But no worries, everything that you need to get a firm footing in F# is in here.

This is truly a 5 star book. Highly recommended.

The table of contents:
Part I. Multiparadigm Programming

Chapter 1. Introduction to F#
Chapter 2. Fundamentals
Chapter 3. Functional Programming
Chapter 4. Imperative Programming
Chapter 5. Object-Oriented Programming
Chapter 6. .NET Programming
Chapter 7. Applied Functional Programming
Chapter 8. Applied Object-Oriented Programming

Part II. Programming F#

Chapter 9. Scripting
Chapter 10. Computation Expressions
Chapter 11. Asynchronous and Parallel Programming
Chapter 12. Reflection
Chapter 13. Quotations
Appendix A. Overview of .NET Libraries
Appendix B. F# Interop

Here is the link to Team Compensation [pdf].

Seth Godin writes well. No doubt about it. But I wish he never wrote this book. I am glad I read this book from the library instead of buying it. Even if I bought it, I would have returned it. I wish Seth would plant quite a few trees to make up for the trees cut down to print this book.

The title of the book is the dip – a little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick). Part of that is true. It is a little book. The second part is false. It teaches you nothing. Seth Godin writes in 80 pages what you already know. The main idea of the book is this – there are certain things you do in life when no matter how hard you try you are not going anywhere. Then there are certain times when the going is tough but if you stick with it, you are going to reap the benefits. The first situation is called the cul-de-sac and the second one is called the dip (there is a third situation called the cliff but that is not even worth mentioning it here). Quit when you are in the cul-de-sac and try harder when you are in the dip. There you are, now please hand over $12.95. Thank you very much.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) is Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘s first new novel in 10 years after Of Love and Other Demons (1994). This is my first Marquez book, although I had a brief stint with One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) which ended after 3 pages. I intend to read it in full, of course, since it is considered Marquez’s masterpiece but from what I heard it requires a more serious effort in reading.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a strange love story in a brothel between a 90 year old writer and a 14 year old girl who works as a day laborer. The book shines in its absolutely magnificent style of cunning yet elegant narration rather than for the plot. The imagery is vivid, nostalgic and takes the reader through an amazing whirlwind of emotions packaged in dark humor and pathos. The book is short, just above 100 pages, and I read it in a couple of days, which is quite unusual for me. The characters in the novel are shrouded in mystery, in a style of narration characteristic of a master story teller, even though they are presented very openly. We end up thinking that we know nothing about the characters after believing we have figured them out. I can’t help but wonder about this specific aspect because often this is so true in real life. How often do we surprise ourself with some specific face of ours that we never knew existed ! This is not really a bad thing per se, for this element of surprise often gives life a special touch of magic and enigma. As the saying goes, when we think we know all the answers life changes all the questions.

An excerpt from the book:

I was beginning to fall asleep in the small hours when I heard something like the sound of multitudes in the sea and a panic in the trees that pierced my heart. I went to the bathroom and wrote on the mirror: Delgadina, my love, the Christmas breezes have arrived.

One of my happiest memories was a disturbance I felt on a similar morning as I was leaving school. What’s wrong with me? The dazed teacher asked: Ah, my boy, can’t you see it’s the breezes? Eighty years later I felt it again when I woke in Delgadina’s bed, and it was the same punctual December returning with its translucent skies, its sandstorms, its whirlwinds in the streets that blew the roofs off houses and lifted the skirts of schoolgirls. This was when the city acquired a spectral resonance. On breezy nights, even in the neighborhoods in the hills, shouts from the public market could be heard as of they were just around the corner. It was not unusual for the December gusts to allow us to locate friends, scattered among distant brothels, by the sound of their voices.

I can’t compare this book with his other creations, since I haven’t read any of the other books, but it definitely made me a big fan of Marquez. I plan to read some more of his books as time permits.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman, who also translated several other books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez including Love in the Time of Cholera (1988), The General in His Labyrinth (1991), Strange Pilgrims: Stories (1993), Of Love and Other Demons (1995), News of a Kidnapping (1997), Living to Tell the Tale(2002).

Columbian born Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. His autobiography Living to Tell the Tale was published in 2002.

This book is a collection of 32 interviews with founders of IT startups. The interviewer is Jessica Livingston who herself is a founding partner of Y-Combinator. The interviewees are:

1. Max Levchin (Paypal)
2. Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail)
3. Steve Wozniak (Apple Computer)
4. Joe Kraus (Excite)
5. Dan Bricklin (Software Arts)
6. Mitchell Kapor (Lotus Development)
7. Ray Ozzie (Iris Associates, Groove Networks)
8. Evan Williams (Pyra Labs – Blogger.com)
9. Tim Brady (Yahoo)
10. Mike Lazaridis (Research in Motion)
11. Arthur Van Hoff (Marimba)
12. Paul Buchheit (Gmail)
13. Steve Perlman (WebTV)
14. Mike Ramsay (TiVo)
15. Paul Graham (Viaweb)
16. Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us)
17. Mark Fletcher (ONEList, Bloglines)
18. Craig Newmark (craigslist)
19. Caterina Fake (Flickr)
20. Brewster Kahle (WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet)
21. Charles Geschke (Adobe Systems)
22. Ann Winblad (Open Systems, Hummer Winblad)
23. David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals)
24. Philip Greenspun (ArsDigita)
25. Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software)
26. Stephen Kauffer (TripAdvisor)
27. James Hong (Hot or Not)
28. James Currier (Tickle)
29. Blake Ross (Firefox)
30. Mena Trott (Six Apart)
31. Bob Davis (Lycos)
32. Ron Gruner (Alliant Computer Systems, Shareholder.com)

Most of the interviews follow this line:

• Getting started.
• Interactions with VCs.
• Some of the more intense moments.
• Turning Points.
• Things that were surprising.
• Felt like quiting at any time ?
• Advice for people looking to start a startup.

Most of the interviews were good, a few were boring and a few came out to be outstanding. I dont want to specify which ones bored because you will be prejudiced in case you are planning to read it. The interviews I found most interesting were the ones with Steve Wozniak, Dan Bricklin, Mitchell Kapor, Craig Newmakr, Charles Geschke, Philip Greenspun, Joel Spolsky and Blake Ross.

Most of these startups had more than one founder and they all swear it would have been impossible to do it alone. There were one man shows also, albeit few. Another interesting fact is that most of these people knew each other during their college period or previous jobs. It makes one wonder whether you need to be in an elite circle to rise above the ordinary.Many of these founders came from Stanford or MIT and several of them previously worked at HP. It seems that HP used to be the ultimate dream company for engineers.

Another fact which might not surprise you is that most founders were young when they cut all the safety ropes at went for it. This shouldnt be surprising because that is the time when you have boundless energy and you dont have a family to take care of so there is less risk. Ofcourse there are exceptions to the young founder phenomenon, but very few.

In the interview with Blake Ross he talks about his new company called Parakey which was developing a new application which was under cover at the time of the interview. It turns out that they were developing an application platform for web and desktop – providing applications the framework to work online and offline. Parakey was bought by Facebook recently.

This book follows the style of a 1986 book from Microsoft Press called Programmers at Work. Interestingly Dan Bricklin and Ray Ozzie are interviewed in that book also.

My rating 8/10.

This book is N. Sivakumar’s attempt at caricaturing the stereotypical Indian software programmer. He talks about a lot of things where you go, “oh boy, this is so true”. Examples are Indians buying only Japanese cars (Toyota, Honda, Nissan), bringing lunch in grocery bags etc.

But to say that this is all what the book does is an injustice to the author. He gives compelling arguments supporting the H1B programme (and immigration in general) and  provides a well balanced presentation of facts. Sivakumar brings light to a lot of issues dealing with H1, outsourcing, racial discrimination etc. He does justice to the topics in his analysis of controversial issues related to immigration and post 9/11 hatred.

Irrespective of the positive points, this books has a few shortcomings. It could do with a lot more editing. I even suspect there was no editor for this book. The layout of the text is ugly – the spacing between the lines is too much (a trick we used in college to make our project report appear larger than what it really was). What pissed me off most was the apologetic tone of writing. He always seems so unsure and lacking confidence, as if afraid of rubbing somebody the wrong way with his opinions. Some things are repeated over and over again which persuades the reader to close the book and reach for another. I so disappointed with this book that I quit reading it halfway through and returned the book to the library. After a couple of months, while browsing the library I saw the book again. This time I took it and read the other half.

What makes me so sad is that this could have been a brilliant book. The author is definitely a sharp guy and he has his facts and compelling arguments but the book did not deliver. Despite all the shortcomings this book is still worth a read.

3 stars.

P.S.
Sivakumar has written another book titled America Misunderstood: What A Second Bush Victory Meant To The Rest Of The World. This seems to be a far better effort.

Brokeback Mountain is a poem hidden away under beautiful prose. It is a short story, about 55 pages, yet it is profoundly heartwarming, with a subtle flow of true emotions and comes across as a refreshing, cool, light rain showering on your heart but comes back to haunt you and touches your soul in the deepest way.

I had seen the movie last year. It was kind of slow, but the beauty of the story was uniquely brilliant. So when I saw the book at the library I instantly grabbed it and read it within a couple of hours. It is all about 2 guys, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, coming to know each other while herding sheep on Brokeback mountain. It is the sad story of their difficult lives, separate yet entwined, and your heart reaches out to them. It is a remarkably enchanting story of forbidden love and longing.

The prose is astoundingly elegant and beautiful. Annie Proulx, critically acclaimed author and Pulitzer prize winner, writes as if painting a beautiful picture. The story flows like a serene river – quiet, beautiful, calm and exceedingly sure of itself. See a couple of excerpts to get a taste of her eloquent prose-

“They stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis’s pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis’s breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still usable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, “Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go”.”

“Without getting up he threw deadwood on the fire, the sparks flying up with their truths and lies, a few hot points of fire landing on their hands and faces, not for the first time, and they rolled down into the dirt. One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.”

Sure enough, I never get enough of stories as beautifully told as this. Never enough.

5 stars, if not more.

Dreaming In Code – Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software written by Scott Rosenberg is my latest read.

Considering that I finished this book almost 10 days ago this review is a bit late. After I read the last page and closed the book, I had mixed feeling about the it. Scott’s writing is very engaging and obviously he did a lot of research for writing this book. Most of the readers of this book would be IT workers, but I guess Scott wanted non-programmers to understand the concepts he was talking about as well. This resulted in some parts of the books being a bit boring for me. Although I would give credit to the author for the most lucid explanation of technical terms, I would have liked the book more if it was more streamlined. I think books of this type should be less than 300 pages, ideally around 250 – concise and to the point. Ironically, I think, cutting out the fluff would have made this book in that range. Sometimes Scott moves between topics almost randomly to the casual reader. In spite of the minor shortcomings, the book provides some valuable insights into the current state of software development.

The book mainly revolves around the development of an open source PIM (Personal Information Manager) application, conceived and funded by Mitchell Kapor, the chairman of the Open Source Application Foundation (OSAF), the founder of Lotus Development Corp and the designer of Lotus-1-2-3 spreadsheet application. Mitch is a well respected person in the open source community for his vision and philanthropic initiatives. He is the board chair of the Mozilla Foundation which makes Firefox. He is an investor and board chair in Linden Lab which created SecondLife. He is also a board member in the Level Playing Field Institute (LPFI). In short, he has made his fortune and name in the software industry. Mitch was born in 1950 in Newyork and he came to Silicon Valley to work as a software consultant in 1978 roughly 7 years after taking in BA from Yale. In 1982 he co-founded the Lotus Development Corp. Here he created the Lotus-1-2-3 spreadsheet application which became a success. Later on he worked on the creation of a PIM application called Lotus Agenda. This application ignited a spark in Kapor’s mind which would later burn as a fire – the Chandler project. Chandler had ambitious targets. Kapor wanted it to be much more usable than an PIM applications available today. and he wanted it to run on Windows, Linux and Mac. It would have the spirit of Lotus Agenda in terms of flexibility and usability. It would be an open source initiative and he would invest $5 million in initial funding.

Scott Rosenberg, a writer, editor and co-founder of Salon, decided that he would be an embedded journalist for the Chandler project. Scott probably thought that it would take about an year for the 1.0 of Chandler to be released. He would write about how an ambitious Open Source exponent becomes the driving force in the creation of an application, opening new horizons in usability and flexibility while embracing the ideals of Free Software. Scott got much more than what he bargained for. He does a brilliant job of putting that down in Dreaming In Code.

To tell a long story short, Dreaming In Code started as Scott Rosenberg’s attempt to sketch a story of how to build a successful open source application but it evolved into a narrative of why and how things go wrong in a software development project. Scott followed the project for 3 years but in that period Chandler didn’t even reach the 1.0 milestone. Dreaming in Code is all about the hardships that Kapor and his developers faced during these 3 years designing and developing Chandler. Although Scott probably went out to write an Open Source success saga, the unexpected turn of events made the book far more valuable. It contains the true story of how an enthusiastic team, with few time and money constraints, faces and overcomes unforeseen issues – just like every other project that you and me has worked on. While reading the book, an empathetic reader would be able to identify the plight of the Chandler project. The disheartening lagging of release dates and inability to decide on one option among many haunted the project right from the early days. It is interesting and humbling to watch software gurus get tossed in the waters of an ambitious project. Sometimes things are far different from what we think they are. There is only one lesson that this book teaches you – developing software is hard.

I would rate it 4 stars.

P.S.

To follow the development of Chandler you can read the OSAF blog.