Reading List

These are the books I am reading now:

  • Coder’s at Work – Peter Seibel’s book of interviews with 15 prominent programmers. So far I have read interviews with Joshua Bloch, Peter Norvig, Ken Thompson, Jamie Zawinski, Douglas Crockford, Donald Knuth and Joe Amstrong. While each chapter is not long enough to assess the character of the interviewees, some of their traits just shines through the words. The choice of subjects is good (although guaranteed not to please everybody) and Peter Seibel asks intelligent questions. Pretty interesting read so far. If I were to rate it now, it would be 8/10.
  • Programming F# – The O’Reilly programming books are usually good and this one is no exception. I have most of the F# books in print today (and also the MEAP of Manning’s upcoming book – Functional Programming for the Real World) but I think this book is the one which is going make me get my feet wet in functional programming. I have read a couple of chapter’s so far and I feel the book is well written. I am beginning to get what makes F# (and functional programming in general) special, but I am not yet to the point where I can say I “get” functional programming. It might take a few months (or years) to get there. If I were to rate it now, it would be 8/10.
  • Say Everything – How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming and Why It Matters – I had read Scott Rosenberg’s previous book – Dreaming In Code – and I did like it. It was a unique book and had the chance of becoming a classic. If I were to guess what went wrong, I would say that the book was just too long. If Scott removed some of the lengthy and boring explanations of some of the technical terms (and removed the repetitions of the boring and lengthy explanations) the book would have been a much better read. I had posted my review of this book on my blog which goes into a little more detail of this. When I completed the first chapter of Say Everything, I had the same feeling – some parts of this chapters needs to be axed. Anyways it it too early to judge and I will keep on reading and update my thoughts here. Don’t get it wrong, it seems like a good book and Scott Rosenberg is an excellent writer, the book just needs to be shorter.
  • Predictably Irrational – Nowadays were are seeing a lot of books like these on the market. I got interested in this genre, thanks to Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Although Blink and Outliers are also good reads, I personally liked Tipping Point more. I also liked Freakonomics and Stumbling on Happiness but I gave up several other books after a couple of chapters. I am listen to Predictably Irritational while I commute to work and it does help pass time.  

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