What's In Your Dead-Tree-Format Library?

Whilst cleaning and reorganising my home office, I came to the realisation that I have accumulated quite a decent amount of books on the various topics in my trade & hobby, software engineering.  After placing my various titles properly in groups on the shelves, I took a photo and it is shown below.  What follows is a breakdown on each book, my thoughts and the source of how it was attained (where remembered/applicable).  Note: Not included are three books currently in transit via Amazon.  One is on ajax, and two are FreeBSD server administration related.

Top shelf first, going left to right:

The Linux Database Bible :: This was a $50.00 book received as a freebie when I attended Linuxworld 2002 at the Jacob Javits Center in NYC.  I can't say that I've used this book much for anything other than the occasional reading fodder when nothing else was within reach.  I'm sure it would be of more use to newbies to both Linux and databases, even now.

Python Essential Reference, 2nd Edition :: I picked this up back in 2003 whilst doing work for a financial company at which I was both senior developer as well as newly appointed (reluctant) CTO.  This is a David Beazley book, and I highly recommend any version of it (there are several newer than my copy) as he is clearly full of expert level knowledge on all things Pythonic.

Python Cookbook :: This was another 2003 or 2004 purchase mainly out of curiosity to see what crafty, yet elegant solutions other Pythonistas has designed and/or implemented.  Definitely a wealth of information on a multitude of topics be it recursively traversing b trees or working with simple CSV files.

Python Pocket Reference :: A simple reference mostly useful for the "batteries included" libraries.

Python Programming Patterns :: This book has shown me why we generally don't rely heavily upon patterns such as those overly used in Java software.  I purchased this along with the Python Cookbook, and quite frankly if I had only acquired this book, my disappointment would have be far greater as I would've had nothing to take my mind off of it.

Perl to Python Migration :: Picked this up at the Micro Center in St. Davids, PA in the early 2000's when I started to migrate some of our perl applications over to Python in the financial world.  Highly recommended, especially for heavy, long-term perl hackers.

Pro Django :: Picked this up in early 2009 as further reference and idea material for the 4 websites I write and maintain for a series of internationally published magazines.  I'm torn on the value of this book, but at least it goes beyond beginner level.

The Definitive Guide to Django, 1st Edition :: Purchased as a reference as soon as it came out, references version .96 of the framework, so if a person is using v1.xx or higher, there are going to be quite a few caveats in the examples, otherwise a wonderful reference, especially when it comes to the appendices.

Practical Django Projects :: A bit of a disappointment as it focuses on blog creation for which a series of examples of this ilk already can be found online for free, not to mention in the Pinax project.

PHP and MySQL Web Development :: I just received this book from a business partner and whist I generally avoid PHP like the plague, I am glad to have references which are a bit more current these days for when I do need to venture into such environments.

Setting up LAMP :: Same as above.

PHP Solutions :: Ditto for this book as well.

Pro Drupal Development :: ibid on this one too.   I don't think I'll ever end up using Drupal, but at least I have a reference if I ever need tit.

Programming PHP :: I inherited this from the previous CTO at the financial firm at which I worked back in 2002/2003 and it has served me well as a reference book.

PHP Pocket Reference :: This also was provided to me with the Programming PHP book.

Programming Ruby, 1st Edition :: The Pick Axe book as it is more fondly referenced by Rubyists.  I picked this book up in 2007 so as to further my own understanding of perl's successor.  I was, in fact, reading it early this evening, though I still find it considerably less useful professionally for me than Python and other solutions.

Programmers at Work, 1st Edition :: This was left to me by a business associate from Ecquire prior to relocated elsewhere.  It is the predecessor of "Coder's at Work", and contains some early Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Xerox and HP developers and views on the industry.

HTML 3 :: Truth be told, this was bequeathed to me by the surviving relatives of my ex-wife when her younger brother died in an untimely manner.  It is rather outdated, though kept solely as a remembrance of a young life that had potential in several areas of his life.

The Pragmatic Programmer :: I might not like a lot of the most recently branched out Pragmatic series be it books or podcasts, but this book is gold in my eyes.  I made this a company purchased, required reading for all developers from Junior to Senior level everywhere I've worked.  It most recently was recommended to an Intern I mentored during the 2009 summer season.  It has also proven valuable to other associates, even those not directly involved in the Software Engineering field(s).

OOP Demystified :: I purchased this book as a means of helping to teach others the basics of Object Oriented Programming.  It is a rather basic book, and uses the transitional OOP examples cases of registering for a class and doing payroll, like umpteen other books on the topic.

Middle shelf second, again from left to right:

Open Source Development with CVS :: Picked this book up on an departmental outing back in 2000 when moving into the Lead Developer role at a Manufacturing company which didnt have an existing source control system in place, and it wasn't yet time to use Subversion and the company was too cheap to acquire Perforce licensing.

Practical C Programming :: Every developer has at least one reference book for C, many have more.  I'm not a big C guy myself, though I find this O'Reilly reference book a wonderful additional to any library, maybe short of the K&R tome.

Teach Yourself C++ :: This book by Al Stevens was something I'd picked up as the desire to torture myself with C++ a.k.a. Bjarne's plague upon the coding world.  I sooner should've picked up a book on Smalltalk or Objective-C.  Note, the book is written well, my comments are mainly aimed at the abomination which is C++.

Learning Java :: I didn't buy this book as a Java reference in as much as I did for its first four chapters, which by and far the single best example laden object oriented chapters of any book, bar none.  Oh, and they are quite humorous as well.

Head First Java :: When recently wanting to get back into the Java world a bit more than in the past (with my playful experimenting), this was ordered on the recommendation of a good long term friend of mine, himself a Senior Software Engineer focused heavily in Java environments.

Java in a Nutshell :: Standard fare O'Reilly reference book, though drier than others and while laid out clearly, something felt amiss.

Core Java :: Sun's own sanctioned Java tome.  Massive, and packed full of information (and for the price is had to be).  Heavy examples on applets and AWT, which as of this writing is a decade out of date.  Makes a great bookend due to its size.

Java2 : A Beginner's Guide :: Probably one of the nicest Java2 introductory manuals.  This one has been loaned out to newbies to Java more than any other Java book in my library.  Clearly written and never dull.

Javascript, The Missing Manual :: Recently purchased and while full of information spends too much effort on jQuery, so much to the point that the book might've been more aptly named "jQuery", and subtitled "with a chapter or two on non-jQuery javascript".

Linux Programming :: Also bequeathed by my ex-wife's famliy.

Linux in 10 Minutes :: ibid.  See above.

Turbo Pascal, 3rd Edition :: Pascal, while originally a teaching language is also an imperative, procedural language good for systems programming much like C and only slighly slower.  Having moved to Pascal from various versions of Basic and ML, I was happy to take this off of my wife's friend after he completed his Pascal course at university.  The section on algorithms is still one which I reference routinely, hence the reason isn't packed away in a box.

Perl 5 Programmer's Reference :: A $4.99 special at a Banes & Noble in Abington, PA back in 2001.  Only covered version 5.004 of perl, but was so well laid out that it beat anything that O'Reilly could muster for perl references.  Quite possibly out of circulation/print as of this article's writing.

Learning Perl Object, References and Modules :: Essential reading for any non-purely functional code to get written when subjected to perl environments.

Programming with CGI.pm :: Nothing says well engineered than written by an engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

Programming the Perl DBI :: Anyone doing anything with databases in perl,  will benfit from this thin yes most definitely useful book.

Perl Best Practices  :: I pick this up after reviewing another copy at an Internet Hosting firm for which I did someork..

Object Oriented Perl :: Damien Conway's opus for Perl and Object Orientation.  Explains limitations and information for making robust Django.

Practical PostgreSQL :: Acquired when the original plans for some of my publishers dontnet

Bottom shelf lastly, contains my spoken language reference library which contains books on:

Dutch, French, Japanese, Welsh, German, Korean, Russian and Spanish.  The majority being in Dutch including several novels and grammer books, followed in a distant second by Welsh grammar books (mostly picked up in Waterstones in London surprisingly), then in a close third, Japanese.  I like languages and I do not limit myself to simply one or two.  Anyone who follows looks at the list of people whom I follow on twitter will easily see all of the above languages utilised, sans Welsh (quick, somebody contact Alan Cox!).

Bonus:  Some of my die-cast cars including my highly favoured Peugeot 206 WRC model that I picked up for £2.99 at Hamley's in London back in '03.  I collect the occasional model car here and there, mainly German, French, English and Italian based, but that is fodder for another blog.

Ruby & Project Realisations

This isn't going to be a long post as it is rather late in the evening (morning) and not only am I trying to rest my leg (hyperextended my knee playing football (soccer for the Americans out there) on Monday evening), but I'm also in need of greater amounts of sleep having a four month old daughter for whom I am the primary care giver starting tomorrow given that my wife works in the academic world.

Short and to the point (for me at least) is that I'm delving back into Ruby (for the third time chronologically), but for the second time on a 'serious' level (i.e. with the intent to actually produce usable code and not simply proof-of-concept understanding code). I'm realising that while I love python which has been part of my daily work for the past five plus years, moreso Django/python in the past two, that it is becoming my 'Java/C#' if you will. By that I mean that it is my work language. It is a clean and elegant language which allows me to focus on getting what I wish completed, completed with minimal fuss and easy maintainability due to its explicit albeit brief and neatly aligned syntax. I feel though that something is missing.

If I can go back a little (and long time readers from previous versions of this blog circa 2002-2006 would remember me discussing this before) and bring up what eventually became my professional lingua of frustration: perl. Larry Wall's masterpiece which I utilised professionally from as far back as 1995 albeit I was working with rexx and pascal(!) more so then. I used perl and was attracted to it because of its expressive hacker roots, but was eventually disgusted by the lack of a decent enforceable object model for doing any kind of OOP work, not to mention maintainability was not its strong suit regardless of how meticulous one might be as a software engineer/coder, etc. This is what ultimately lead me to look at ruby but only briefly as it had residual taste of perl all over it. I found python shortly thereafter and have been happy ever since, until recently.

Sure I've looked and learned other languages in the meantime (as well as used them for personal and professional purposes), but just for the past three weeks or so I've realised that some of python's strong suit do indeed take some of the more guttural joy out of hacking out code. In my line of work I find formality and structure do wonders at getting solid code and meeting my clients' needs, which is the whole point. I'm at the point professionally where I don't get calls or emails saying that "something broke". It is much akin to Apple computers. Things just work without fail, as should be expected.

This ties into my other piece of the recent puzzle. I'm doing web framework design and implementation (amongst other custom software components) for primarily lifestyle, art and fashion magazines. It does pay the bills and it is at least involved with a creative branch of what can be a boring industry (publishing), though I find myself pining for more intellectually/scientific/theoretical research based projects/content. This isn't going to be happening anytime soon where I'm currently spending my efforts (professionally as it were). I have no design to stop doing what I'm doing and for whom I'm doing said work. I enjoy the relationship I have with my clients and there isn't anything wrong there. I'm being kept busy with new work so that's nothing about which to complain.

What I am looking to do is start working on some more experimental/theoretical designs and codebases/classes/packages in Ruby so that I can further explore the language and enjoy the more 'hack' mindedness which I find comes with such an expressive language. I will most definitely share my results with all the CodeDEVL readership (as well as podcast subscribers). I may even post a screen-cast soon as my copy of Snow Leopard for my Octo-Mac Pro (8-Core) should be here on Friday and includes new screen-cast capturing built-in to Quicktime X.

If anyone is in the Doylestown region of Pennsylvania and would like to meet up to talk code, please drop me a line. My email is simply 'eric' at this domain (assuming you're not reading this from the source blogger domain but the domain for which the header image at the top of the page states clearly.

I'll keep everyone informed. Until next time..

-Eric

Some Coders that Stand Out in My Mind

   No, no, no..  Unlike in the movie “Antitrust", I never was fortunate(?) enough to work in an environment like “The Egg”.  I’ve never worked for a huge computer company or internet startup during their heyday such as Google, Netscape (back in the day) or Apple though after reading of some of the stories of those of have, I feel like it must’ve been a blast (albeit tiring).  I can however say that I’ve met a multitude of interesting people over the years and would like to mention just a few of them here, with the hope of eventually getting in contact with one or more of them in the future.

    I will try to keep everyone in a quasi-chronological order for the sake of clarity when discussing the environment in which I interacted with said individuals.

    Joseph ‘Joey’ Springer III:    Joey was my neighbour as a child who happened to live right around the corner.  We both had obsessions with computers from the earliest days of our youth.  His father was Joseph Springer, Jr., an engineer at RCA and ultimate provider of an early teletype machine along with a seemingly endless supply of punch cards with which we would goof around for countless hours.  While we never coded together, he was a close friend whose intelligence shone through at all times, not to mention he was a keen player of ‘Dark Castle’ on his sister Kathy’s Macintosh which she was required to have since she was attending Drexel University at the time.  I haven’t see Joey since the late 1980’s but know that he’s out there somewhere.  Last I heard he was achieving his degree in Mathematics somewhere in New Jersey, USA.

    Walter ‘Walt’ Thesing & Michael ‘Mike’ Simons (a.k.a. Jesus):  Back in the 10th grade at the high school I attended after my stint at an Engineering and Science magnet school in Philadelphia, I took a class in Pascal.  I’d been programming for many years at this point, but never took any formal classes on the topic.   I’d known BASIC for quite some time but never had any experience in in other languages at any kind of serious level.   Well, it was in this class that I met Walt.  He was quite adept at coding the older Apple ][‘s our school utilised and spent much of his free time coding and playing his version of Tetris.  We ended up befriending one another in class along with my coding partner (at the time) Michael ‘Mike’ Simons (a.k.a. Jesus) and through the process learned that we shared a certain fondness for coding whilst listening to the B52’s.  It was through coding whilst listening to the aforementioned musical ensemble that the idea for this post as well as the memory of Walt popped into my head.  I don’t know if Walt went into computers professional, or another science/mathematics field, but it woud be a sad loss for those fields if this were how it played out.  Mike Simons went on to work with the Slackware Linux distribution and I last saw him at Linux World Expo, New York in 2001.  I’d like to hear from either of them if they’re out there.

    Daniel ‘Dan’ Ervine:  During my seven year stint at Alliance Remanufacturing in Philadelphia, PA, USA at the turn of the past millennium I worked with a fledgling Network Engineer fresh out of a Marist College (a.k.a. Mattress College) named Dan.   

    When Dan and I first started working together he was still very much a Microsoft tool, but after exposing him to the real world of Unix and Unix knock offs like the various Linux distributions out there, I deemed him cured of his previous MS affliction.  We only got the opportunity to work with one another for a couple of years due to a restructuring which saw him lose his position right around the same time as his birthday and wedding.  

    We’d worked together on several projects (primarily me assisting in his Networking world) since it was something I wanted to at least learn and partake in once since I never work in the administrative capacity these days.  We grew to become friends and had the joy of travelling several times on business together (including two Linux World Expos in New York) and CAMM in Connecticut. 

    He’d changed dramatically over the years, all for the better and while it has only been a few years since I’ve been able to see and/or talk with him, I’d like to as I’m curious as to what he and his wife are up to, and where he is in his career, though I’m sure it’s a good place.

    So as I said earlier, there are many individuals with whom I’ve had interactions in the computing field which I’d like to speak to again given the opportunity.  I have many others whom I’d like to make mention but being that it is 00:45 in the morning as I type this  whilst watching “Ghost in the Shell : Standalone Complex” on the tele, I need to end it here.  I will continue this list in a later thread when time avails itself.