Category Archives: Book Review

The Best Software Writings I

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As you can see from here, I am reading quite a few books lately. I am not a speed reader and so I dont get to read all the books that I want to. The reading list has changed after I wrote this page – i finished a couple, moved some to future reading list, stopped some in the middle and added quite a few to the list. I hope to update the list to reflect the changes soon.

I just completed reading a book called “The Best Software Writings I – Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky”. As the name implies, it is a collection of articles relating to software selected by celebrity blogger Joel Spolsky from submissions by his blog readers. He gives a brief introduction to the author and the topic of the article at the beginning of each chapter. Sometimes the introduction is better than the actual essay. A few of the articles are excellent, some are good and a few are mediocre. The quality forms the Bell curve of standard normal distribution. Nobody can get it all right. Not even Joel. All except one of the articles in the book are available online. So I intend to post the links here so that you can read them for free (sorry Joel).

  1. Style Is Substance by Ken Arnold
  2. Award For The Silliest User Interface: Windows Search by Leon Bambrick
  3. The Pitfalls Of Outsourcing Programmers – Why Some Software Companies Confuse The Box With The Chocolates by Michael Bean
  4. Excel As A Database by Rory Blyth
  5. ICSOC04 Talk by Adam Bosworth
  6. Autistic Social Software by danah boyd
  7. Why Not Just Block the Apps That Rely on Undocumented Behaviour ? by Raymond Chen
  8. Kicking the Llama by Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi
  9. Save Canada’s Internet from WIPO by Cory Doctorow
  10. EA: The Human Story by ea_spouse
  11. Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing by Bruce Eckel
  12. Processing Processing by Paul Ford
  13. Great Hackers by Paul Graham
  14. The Location Field is the New Command Line by John Gruber
  15. Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit by Gregor Hohpe
  16. Passion by Ron Jeffries
  17. C++ – The Forgotten Trojan Horse by Eric Johnson
  18. How Many Microsoft Employees Does It Take to Change a Lightbulb? by Eric Lippert
  19. What to Do When You’re Screwed by Michael “Rands” Lopp
  20. Larry’s Rules of Software Engineering #2 by Larry Osterman
  21. Team Compensation by Mary Poppendieck [Not Available Online]
  22. Mac Word 6.0 by Rick Schaut
  23. A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy by Clay Shirky
  24. Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software by Clay Shirky
  25. Closing the Gap, Part 1 by Eric Sink
  26. Closing the Gap, Part 2 by Eric Sink
  27. Hazards of Hiring by Eric Sink
  28. PowerPoint Remix by Aaron Swartz
  29. A Quick (and hopefully Painless) Ride Through Ruby (with Cartoon Foxes) by why the lucky stiff

I should say Joel saved the best for the last. All in all, this was an interesting read. I would surely buy Part 2 if and when it comes out.

Currently I am reading Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg which is about the development of Chandler.

Running With Scissors

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Running With ScissorsRunning with Scissors is an unbelievable story. Nevertheless, it is a true story and it is written by the person who could tell it best – the person who lived the story. Running with Scissors is the memoirs of Augusten Burroughs who has authored other books like Dry, Magical Thinking, Possible Side Effects, Sellevision etc. Running with Scissors was #1 on the Newyork Times Bestseller list and stayed on the list for two and a half consecutive years. The book was made into a movie by the same name by director Ryan Murphy who also wrote the screenplay. The movie has been nominated for the 2007 Golden Globe award. The novel Sellevision is also being made into a movie by director Mark Bozek.

In Running with Scissors, the author tells his story as a teenager who used to be a neat freak but is forced to live in a house where they put turds on the picnic table and consider them as words from God. Augusten is gay, his parents are divorced, his mother is lesbian and she is mentally unstable and is treated by a weird psychiatrist, his boyfriend is a psycho and he lives in a madhouse where he lives an unbelievable life which is portayed in the book in the most humorous way, though dark by its very nature. The very fact that Augusten finds humor in these situations is what makes this book outstanding. I believe that for the same reason he was able to survive through his childhood without losing his sanity – seeing the humor in the dark episodes of one’s life. Augusten could have written his story in a different way – the sad story of a child facing abuse from his family and all those around him or a motivational story of a child who suffered hardships and fought his way through. But Augusten chose the best way and if we give it a second thought we can see that the story is really inspiring too. A lot of people, including me, would fare a lot better if we could see the humor in life. But we just see the melancholy, the drama, the losses, the tears – the unfair life.

I would rate this book 5 stars – it is original, humorous, thought provoking, brilliantly written and highly entertaining.

P.S. Augusten has a blog here.

Great Expectations

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I am back into the reading groove. I am really completing the books that I start reading and that is something that hasn’t happened much in the recent past. I was always a voracious reader. A small mountain of Balarama and Poompatta was my best friend when I was a kid. I had read all the Tintin adventures and most of Asterix & Obelix comics by the time I was 10 years old. Hundreds of Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Famous Five, Secret Seven books were devoured with a passion not shown for anything else. I had read the Illiad and Odyssey before my classmates even knew they existed. In college I shifted to Sidney Sheldon, Frederick Forsythe and Jeffrey Archer. While struggling with my engineering studies I got interested in computers and programming and slowly I moved towards technical books. This caused a slight change in my reading habit – I started to quit reading books in midway. Since tech books are usually dense and would require a good amount of concentration and effort to read the reading process would be slow. By the time I read a few chapters I would grow interested in an another book. So I would leave this one and move to another. I remember having read somewhere that the habit of browsing the internet a lot tend to shorten your attention span and ability to concentrate. This could be true since we are always moving from one webpage to another and from one window to another (ALT + TAB). The page has to be really interesting to us to make us stay there for more an a few seconds. Whatever the reason, I found my reading habit disappointing – I was never reading a book to completion. The Tipping Point was the first book which I read fully after a long period. Recently I have started reading fiction again which has brought back the tendency to finish the book. I am carefully limiting my fiction reading to a few carefully chosen titles (due to lack of time) and I am planning to write reviews of the book I read (both fiction and non-fiction). I have already written a couple of reviews (here and here) but I intend to do this more frequently. I just wrote the first review (Running From Scissors) but I thought I would write about writing reviews first before actually posting the review to give my dedicated blog readers (yes, all 3 of them) a little context.

You can see a list of books I am currently reading here. All the reviews would be under the “Book-Review” tag.

Bridges of Madison County

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I haven’t read a book in one sitting for a long long time. I like to take my time while reading books pausing every few pages and thinking over what I read till then. This is the same whether the book is fiction or non-fiction, but the pausing time is usually greater for non-fiction books, understandbly. Today I went to Minneapolis Central Library and while browsing the shelves I saw the book, “Bridges of Madison County”. I had seen the movie earlier and had liked it very much, especially towards the ending scenes. I am a huge fan of Clint Eastwood and I like all his movies, so me liking this movie was no surprise. I had heard that this movie was a special case where the movie out-did the book, which usually doesnt happen.
I took the book from the shelf and read the first few pages and I got interested. I just sat down on the floor and continued reading it. Soon I reached 50 pages and I thought I should read the book fully and so I found a comfortable chair and read the whole book in one sitting. Many a times my eyes filled with tears (it is not surprising anyway, I am a typical cancerian – emotional and sensitive).
I finished the book just before the library closed and sat there for atleast 10 minutes pondering over the greatest love story I ever read. Contrary to popular opinion I think that, in this case also, the movie didnt reach to upto the beauty of the book. I really cant figure out what made me read a book whose story I knew fully (as I had seen the movie), yet move me so deeply. Whatever the reason I am glad that I read the book. Try it, I am sure you would too…P.S. I wrote this as a reader review for amazon.com, then thought of publishing it as a blog entry too. I think I am running out of topics to blog about, lol.

The Tipping Point

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I wrote this some months ago, but forgot to publish it at that time. It has been quite some time since a read a book from start to finish. In fact it has been years. Last week, Abhishek and Prasanth had come to Bangalore and I went to The Forum with them. In LandMark I saw a low priced edition of The Tipping Point. I have been seeing Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking on the top sellers list for quite some time and I knew that The Tipping Point was written by the same author (Malcolm Gladwell). So I thought I would give the book a try. I was planning to go home on 31st, so anyway I would be getting some time to read. I started reading the book on that evening itself. After reading through the first few pages, i was not quite impressed. But soon the book started picking momentum. The book has something special about it, there is no cute jugglery with words, it is written in a very straightforward manner without the slightest attempt to make himself sound smart. The core of the book is an explanation of how epidemics get started. An epidemic is not be taken only in the medical sense, it also refers to how all of a sudden certain behavioural patterns emerge which produce a sweeping change. The previous sentence actually doesnt do justice to the contents. It is almost like a thriller story, the author first mentions about an epidemic and analyzes the causes that we associate with the epidemic. Then the twist comes – slowly we are put into an entirely different perspective which sometimes leaves us spell-bound, the facts sometimes so strange that we cant even believe it.This book presents a very interesting read. As I mentioned earlier, I read this book from cover-to-cover in 2-3 days, something which I havent done in years. I would give it 4.5 stars out of 5.