Sam Gentile: Sam::Books

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 16:35:15 GMT

Distributed Programming Runtime Systems: Inside Rotor
Gary Nutt. University of Colorado

"This is a hands-on book that focuses on the internals of a CLI implementation on a UNIX platform"

Cool! This morning Google led me to this book. There are several chapters online too. I only had time to glance at them this morning, but looks like good stuff. Check out chapter 3 for a nice overview of the VES.

[Managed Space]

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 14:30:16 GMT

Writing Secure Code

This book provided a few new insights, but nothing earth-shattering. It's a good read for newer programmers, but [good] seasoned programmers will have already run into a lot of the described issues and learned from their mistakes. [Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog]

I agree that its quite basic. However, judging from the amount of buffer overruns that are seen in everyday C/C++ code, and the fact that Buffer Overrun checks had to be put into Everett C++, I don't at all agree that many programmers are writing C/C++ write code that doesn't have these problems (or even aware). Heck, to some extent Java and C#/.NET exist for large reasons because of the failure of C/C++ programmers to write good safe code.

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 20:32:14 GMT

Charles Petzold is a very cool guy. Of course we've all read his 1998 Programming Windows, the bible of Win32...I was weaned in the original 1990 Programming Windows. I've just finished another offering from Charles. It's called Code. It's absolutely worth it if you can find a copy. If you want to explain to your spouse what you do for a living, get it. If you want to show someone not-to-technical why alternate number bases (hex, binary, etc) are interesting, get it.

I actually wrote 7 chapters of a similar book where I started from the Light Bulb and went up to the modern microprocessor. I shopped it around to various publishers and then scrapped the idea when I discovered Charle's book. He writes with startling clarlity. He starts with morse code and braille and works up through history building and building...past light bulbs, the construction of memory, flip flops, older processors, assembly language...it's just fantastic.

This book should really be required reading in any CS101 class. Hell, I'd make it required reading for High School Seniors. It can "fill in the gap" for some many technology questions. So many people take technology for granted...it just works. I'm surprised at how few people ask "Why." My kids will read this book...I have no kids, so as soon as they are born...and learn to read.

[Scott Hanselman's Weblog]

Totally agree. Great book!

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 13:24:49 GMT

Amazon.com: Top 2002 Computers and Internet.

OMG, "Advanced .NET Remoting" is in the "Top 10 Editor's Picks: Computers and Internet" for 2002 (and it's the only .NET book there). This rocks! [Ingo Rammer's DotNetCentric]

Wow! Congrats Ingo.

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 21:00:23 GMT

Jason is working on another book. If it is his CIL Programming and .NET Security books are any indication, it will be another fine addition to the library.

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 23:10:41 GMT

Essential .NET Security. Keith Brown, fellow DM instructor and security geek, is writing Essential .NET Security online - a draft ASP.NET chapter kicks things off. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]

I can't think of anyone more qualified to write such book. As Keith has so aptly demonstrated in his writings, talks, courses, and work over the last few years, Keith has a superb understanding of all the aspects of security both unmanaged and managed. I am quite pleased and looking forward to this must-have book.

Sat, 05 Oct 2002 13:21:33 GMT

CIL Programming.

Peter Drayton recently made some Observations on CIL books. He summed them up very well. For most developers I think CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET would be the best buy because its an introductory text and is much more readable as a result. [Cook Computing]

I'm also re-reading this book at the moment and agree as well. I did a lot of reading in the last few weeks myself and hope to get around to posting on it.

Thu, 03 Oct 2002 19:03:09 GMT

I took Simon's most excellent recomendation on Yassar's (who, as Don told me, is now on his team) Real World XML Web Services: For VB and VB .NET Developers. I rush-ordered this book, 24-hour shipped and read 1/2 of it yesterday. I don't know what to say that won't sound like I'm going to an extreme or paid by Yassar-) but this is the single best Web Services book I have ever read. Its clear, its real-world, it's focused on the right things and its even Keith's favorite Web Services book. Its approach is very readable yet thorough and I'm finally starting to understand Schema.

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 01:13:54 GMT

Observations on CIL books. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]

Mon, 23 Sep 2002 00:29:35 GMT

Librarian Reputation. Smart Mobs is live! "Howard Rheingold's new book, "Smart Mobs," is coming out next November. It's a hell of a book, about the ways that technology enable groups of people to spontaneously form and coordinate in response to current events -- from SMS-enabled Filipiino demonstrations over official censorship to ubiquitous Japanese kids who photograph everything with their DoCoMo phones and post them online all the time. Howard's site, SmartMobs.com, is a... [The Shifted Librarian]

Sun, 22 Sep 2002 20:49:01 GMT

Whew! A Big Fall Cleaning. Sue and I have spent the last 4 hours cleaning out the spare bedroom of 9 bags of papers (trash), filed all the boxes of technical books back into the office, and refiled more than 400 Science Fiction books in alphabetical order in the office. Finally had to make an entire shelf and more just for Philip K Dick books and a few for Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker! Also uncovered in the rubble was my long lost HP Jornado PocketPC so now I can start playing with Smart Device Extensions and .NET Compact Framework Beta 1

Tue, 20 Aug 2002 20:42:49 GMT

Mr. Slippery. I always wish I could read Neuromancer for the first time again, because nothing before or since has given me the rush that it did. What I did come across, recently, was True Names: And The Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier. It's a combination of Vernor Vinge's True Names, which was published in 1981 and presaged Neuromancer, and a collection of mid-90's essays on crypto, identity, digital rights management, and related themes. ... [Jon's Radio]

Yes, yes on both. Neuromancer was a ground-breaker. The world of SF was not the same afterwards. And True Names was a true visionary work. In the edition, you describe, the are some fascinating essays. Highly recomended.

Thu, 01 Aug 2002 19:12:02 GMT

There are very few people in the world I would entrust the writing of a real VS.NET book to. Chris Sells is one of them. His work with GenX produced one of the most useful VS.NET add-ins and productivity tools ever made. His articles on various areas of VS.NET show a mastery of the subject: Visual Studio for Applications Provides Customized Scripting Facilities for Your .NET Project, Adding Custom Project Item Templates to VS.NET, Generative Programming: Modern Techniques to Automate Repetitive Programming Tasks, Visual Studio .NET: Managed Extensions Bring .NET CLR Support to C++. For those who work in Visual Studio.NET daily and particlarly those of us who work in the areas of extending the environment beyound documented boundaries, or to add new functionality, our picks in books are the nil pointer. The market is full of books that add nothing. They show screen shots of pulling down the New Project menu and little more. I am very happy to see Chris working on a real VS.NET book,a definitive one. I am also exteremly encouraged to see Microsoft granting Chris to allow some discussion of my particular favorite (sometimes not so favorite) area: VSIP in which I spent most of my working hours. The content looks great and I am extremly excited by this book in the works.

Wed, 31 Jul 2002 02:15:31 GMT

Developer Jedi Masters Write....

Joe points to two brilliant looking books:

Test Driven Development (Kent Beck) is a book devoted to the black art of unit-testing. Remember in Return of the Jedi when Yoda was rambling on about how to be an effective Jedi and then in Attack of the Clones you actually see him strut his stuff - and he kicks ass... well Kent kicks ass.

and

Enterprise Application Architecture (Martin Fowler) is his long awaited book that's been evolving on his website for over a year. This book looks at design and architectural patterns of enterprise systems and discusses many practical implementations that can be built ranging from the quick and simple to very clever and scalable.

[rebelutionary]

Cool, Kent does kick ass and Martin is one of my favorite tech guys.

Mon, 29 Jul 2002 14:02:53 GMT

Want to be a better programmer? Read The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas!

I can't recommend this book enough having already read others like The Mythical Man-Month, Writing Solid Code and Code Complete.[Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog]

Agreed. Great book, as are the others listed.

Wed, 24 Jul 2002 06:04:29 GMT

I have come in on a contract basis for the last 7 months and helped Groove produce some great things. We have had a great relationship and will continue to have one in the future (with Groove work). The current contract will complete on July 30th and I am available. I am interested in continuing to do .NET and Web Services work. If you are interested, you can contact me at ManagedCode at attbi.com.

Mon, 22 Jul 2002 00:01:46 GMT

Wolfram's A New Kind of Science is execrable. It's 1100 pages based on a point that everyone interested in the subject already knew: simple cellular automata can have arbitrarily complex behavior. Given that CAs and Turing Machines are the particle accelerators of computer science, and given the heavy buzz related to algorithmic thermodynamics, and given Wolfram's claims, a reasonable expectation of this book is that the "new kind of science" might, oh I don't know, consist of something more than 1100 pages of "Look at the pictures and you'll develop an intuition that I'm a genius." Instead, Wolfram seems to think that the generation of complex sequences from simple rules is some kind of shattering revelation. At first, you think "Okay, maybe I'm missing something," but there's no there there. It's as if Wolfram had never heard of complex numbers, had never heard of pi (which can also be generated from a simple formula).

For a much better popular book on the deep relationship between computer science and physics, try Fire In The Mind. For something meatier, I like Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information: The Proceedings of the 1988 Workshop on Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information.

[Larry O'Brien's Radio Weblog]

Mon, 22 Jul 2002 00:01:29 GMT

A review of A New Kind of Science in New Scientist makes the excellent point that one of the huge problems with it is that it doesn't make disprovable claims. One thing that's been interesting is that the reviews of ANKoS have been quite mild, while its flaws are obvious. This is certainly due in part to the respect that one should accord Wolfram for his role in developing the theories of cellular automata. But as ANKoS is a book that I feel qualified in making absolute statements about, it makes me wonder about The Skeptical Environmentalist, which has been absolutely excoriated in the scientific press. Is that book just monumentally bad or are the attacks on it just so much more vehement than on ANKoS because The Skeptical Environmentalist is politically incorrect? [Larry O'Brien's Radio Weblog]

Sun, 21 Jul 2002 16:41:39 GMT

I've branched off a whole bunch of Category pages and will start experimenting with keeping most of the content into categories so that people interested in certain things won't have to read all the other stuff in one mondo page: .NET, Science Fiction, Books, Groove, Personal and Family, XML and Web Services, Science.