Recommended
TCP/IP Network Administration, second edition
Thankfully, I don't have to spend a lot of time down it the guts of TCP/IP network administration but when I do need to go there, this book generally comes up trumps for me.
High Performance Linux Clusters
by Joseph D. Sloan
Useful overview of the entire field covering OSCAR, Rocks, OpenMosix, MPI...If you need a survey in order to decide what routes to take through the Linux Clustering Architecure maze, this book is for you.
UK
US
Buddhism Plain and Simple
by Steve Hagen
A useful accompaniament to Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor (below). Features an visual puzzle (a picture of a cow) that stumped me.
US
UK
Buddhism Without Beliefs
by Stephen Batchelor
A useful accompaniament to Buddhism Plain and Simple by Steve Hagen above. It is interesting the extent to which you can peel laters of various Buddhist traditions and get down to a non-Deistic core which is all about achieving personal contentment throught non-attachment and what might be termed "tactical" altruism.
UK
US
e: THe Story of a Number
by Eli Maor
PI gets all the attention but e is much more interesting in my opinion. Popping up everywhere from interest rates to geometry to music to natural sciences, its everywhere.
The math occasionally gets a bit heavy but its mostly shoved off into the appendices where it can be safely ignored.
The Fabric of Reality
by David Deutsch
Heavy going at times (in terms of content and in terms of prose) but worth it. The parallel universe approach to making sense of quantum dynamics gets a thorough run out.
Information: The New Language of Science
by Hans Christian von Baeyer
A nice, easy read overview of how information may be a more fundamental part of science than it is generally considered to be. By this I mean, it may have a role down in the deep theories of what makes a universe, well, a universe. I think of it like this: without the ability to differentiate one thing from another thing, there can be no reality. If the universe was just a uniform distribution of empty vacuum with no atomic matter, dark matter or dark energy there would be essentially nothing. Things can only form when some part of reality is different from some other part of reality: this is an atom, that is an X-ray. This is hydrogen, that is oxygen...that sort of thing. As soon as things are differentiable..you have information. In that sense, information is a fundamental aspect of reality.
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Jorge Luis Borges
Borges has the soul of a geek. In fact, he reads like a
spanish-speaking, lisp programming, XML dochead with a background in
epistemology. Fascinating.
.NET and J2EE Interoperability Toolkit
by S. Guest
Useful overview of the patterns and techniques applicable to .NET/J2EE interop.
E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation
by David Bodanis
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Very readable history of the whole energy=mass thing. Contains some
interesting nuggets about Einstein and some scary nuggets about the
history of radioactivity research. I will never look at toothpaste or
a cookbook in quite the same way again.
Slaughterhouse Five
by Kurt Vonnegut
Amazon UK
Amazon US
A weird but oddly gripping read. More effective at communicating the
horrors of war than any amount of blood and guts action writing.
The Man Who Knew Infinity: Life of the Genius Ramanujan
by Robert Kanigel
A very readable look at the life of one of Mathematics purest, rawest, geniuses.
A Mathematician's Apology
by G.H. Hardy
A short and bitter sweet look at the life of a pure mathematician by a
pure mathematician.
Mother Tongue
by Bill Bryson
This book is brimful of excellent not-many-people-know-that factoids
about the English language. Examples : Shakespeare is responsible for
the phrase "to back a horse". There are about 150 words in English
that got there because of typos in dictionaries (ha!). "demit" is the
antonym of "commit" which, unfortunately, has fallen into
disuse. Instead, we geeks have to say "roll back" as the opposite of
"commit". What a shame.
My favourite new word out of this book?
Catachresis. Yummy.
Algorithmics - The spirit of computing
by by David Harel
A very readable 30 thousand feet tour of formal correctness,
efficiency, intractability, universality, undecidability, parallelism
and probabilistic methods. In other words, big chunks of Computer
Science in a digestable 400 pages or so.
Ingenious Ireland
by Mary Mulvihill
A county by county breakdown of scientific shenanigans in Ireland over
the centuries.
It turns out that the mathematician
George
Stokes - he of 'Navier Stokes Equations' fame. (shudder). Was born
just down the road from where I live in Sligo.
Even closer to home (Collooney) is the birthplace of William Higgins
who invented the chemical notation for Oxygen.
Down in Cork, an accountant by the name of Percy Ludgate had the
designs for a computer in 1909. Like the well known Babbage machine,
it was never built but it contained some fundamental innovatations
such as the concept of a subroutine. Who would have thought that
expunging gotos began with an Irish accountant?
Its hard to put this book down once you dip into it.
The man who loved only numbers
by Paul Hoffman
Amazon UK
Amazon US
An engaging bio of Paul Erdos, the eccentric mathematician. His field,
graph theory is particularly relevant on the platform known as the
Web. In particular the concept of an "Erdos number" invented by his
colleagues is an early example of what today would probably be called
"social sofware".
Information Rules
by Carl Shapiro & Hal Varian
A sobering analysis of the economic realities of the software and
e-content businesses. Anybody on the receiving end of vendor pitches
about "open systems" and "zero lockin" and "standards based" design
needs to read this book.
There are only so many business models for software and yes, they
pretty much all involve maximising your switching costs and squeezing
you for recurring revenue. Remember, their business model is not your
business model.
That all fine and good. Its the realities of capitalism. I'm all for
it. But I'm also all for customers being cognisant of the rules
of the game. This book spells them out.
The Tipping Point
by Malcom Gladwell
Amazon UK
Amazon US
An interesting and easy read. Some times things reach a point and
then...bang, all is changed. Obviously really, once you see it
written down. When reading about connectors and mavens, I found myself
buttoning people I knew into those categories. The organisational
magic number stuff is very interesting too. I will never be able to
look at the number 150 again without thinking about it.
The Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Interesting sanity check on the information technology
revolution. Information, its production, desimmination and use are all
extremely social phenomena. Failure to cater for 'soft' issues in IT
can lead to unexpected negative consequences.
The Monk and the Philosopher
by Jean-Francois Revel & Mathiew Ricard
An engaging series of conversations beteen a father and a son who
happen to be western philosopher and Tibetan Buddhist monk
respectively.
East meets west stuff on epistomology, consciousness, morality etc.
Metamagical Themas - Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Great collection of essays from the full vista of Hofstadter's
interests. From Rubic Cubes to chaos to AI to number numbness. A great
to dip into which always gives me something to think about.
The Search for the Perfect Language
by Umberto Eco
Amazon UK
A scholarly tour through the most prominent attempts at constructing
perfect languages over the centuries. Reading this book will make you
appreciate the complexities of language and may even lead to an
appreciation of those irregular verbs that drove you wild in school.
Godel, Escher, Bach
by Douglas Hofstadter
Amazon UK
Wonderful. As a kid in first year comp. sci., this book was an eye
opener. It provided validation of a suspicion I had that computing -
especially software - could just as easily be housed in the Arts
Faculty.
Neuromancer
by William Gibson
Amazon UK
Just read it. Drop everything and read it NOW.
Programming Python
by Mark Lutz, Laura Lewin, Frank Willson
Amazon UK
A classic. The first edition of this got me started with Python many
years ago. Back then it was one of only two books available on
Python. How things have changed.
Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
by Stephen Pinker
Amazon UK
An engaging tour (I flicked some of the detail) around human language
and its rules. I have a newfound appreciation for irregular verbs and
a boxload of new "not many people know that" factoids.
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
by Simon Blackburn
Amazon UK
A wonderful hypertexted dictionary. Impossible to put down because any
term you look up, probably is within 6 degrees of separation of every
other term and the hypertext will get you there.
Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics
by George Johnson
Amazon UK
A bio of Murray Gell-Mann. Very readable. Fascinating insights into
the mans personality as well as his work. I'd recommend reading it
back-to-back with Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics
Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics
by James Gleick
A bio of the great Richard Feynman. Very accomplishes as you would
expect from Gleick. I'd recommend reading it back-to-back with Strange
Beauty.
Enterprise Integration Patterns : Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions
by Gregor Hohpe, Bobby Woolf
Amazon UK
Amazon US
In case you had not noticed, software integration using XML messaging
is basically how Enterprise Application Integration will be done for
the forseable future. Web Services, SOAP, REST, Tuple Spaces, SOA,
ESB, Indigo, MDB - take your pick. Messaging is *not* about
objects. Messaging is *not* about databases. Messaging is *not* about
two phase commit ACID transactions. If you are an object guy or a
database guy struggling to get to grips with messaging, this book is
for you.
Chaos - Making a new science
by James Gleick
Amazon UK
Amazon US
This was the first book I read about chaos theory. In 96 I think. For
a few years before that I had been coding up fractals and fernleaves
for display on a 32 bit TI graphics chip we used at work.
A great easy reading introduction and some great plates.
Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
Amazon UK
Amazon US
A book about war and science and math and money. The only novel I have
ever read that contains a perl script. Whats not to like?
Naming and Necessity
by Saul Kripke
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Thinking about URIs versus URNs? Contemplating a bout of nominalism?
Planning an argument with a logical positivist? This book is for you.
Kripke is one of those exacerbating thinkers (like Chomsky) who
says/writes intriguing stuff on some subject and then moves off to
think about other stuff, leaving a trail of debate in their wake.
In Kripke's case, he questions a whole bunch of generally accepted
stuff from Russell and Frege to do with names and what names really
do.
Its fascinating to read this stuff with one eye on URIs and the other
on URNs:-)
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