#Books

Perhaps I was just expecting a lot, lot more from a book that purports to teach Hackers Design and subtitled Reverse Engineering Beauty but, at best, I’d only be able to give DfH an “ok” rating.

While I was hoping for something that would both illuminate and then directly show how to apply Design learnings from a hacking perspective or even the many, many rues of thumb and underpinnings that define Design, I found the book more a theoretical tour through the underpinnings which often meandered and went off course (I still don’t know why SEO was discussed at length) and was a bit disappointing. A number of any elementary books on visual and information Design could have taken its place and the “for Hackers” in its title seemed marketing hype rather than applicable reality. It did, however, have an excellent section on Typography which I found personally very useful.

I have to admit I was a bit sceptical going into this book. It seemed to promise a lot with a simple premise and one, frankly, that made solutions to a lot of my product problems way simpler.

So, I was reading with a bit of scepticism and pleasantly surprised.

And yet still, despite the fact I think it does sort of approach storymapping from a very ideal direction, and doesn’t get into the weeds of what happens on complex projects or how to untangle a bigger and more problematic project, it does make a clear and compelling case for storymapping helping with the What of needs to be delivered often where quite often the problem is developers using Agile techniques and getting lost in the trees and quagmired in the How of implementing something.

I have to admit I really, really wanted to like this book.

While at least one of our company offices has invested a lot in getting across Clojure as being the next big thing for some of the technical projects we could be running and it does seem interesting enough on its surface (particularly with interesting datastore developments like Datamic) and purports to solve some interesting problems that are difficult to do so in other languages, I have to admit the primary draw of the book for me was the fact the writer had a style similar to that of Why the lucky stuff whose book on Ruby sucked me back into programming and enjoying building digital products again.

Subtitled Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, I have to admit I really kind of liked this book. While I don’t agree with everything that Horowitz did in his career at Opsware (and its always easy to Monday morning quarterback someone else’s decisions), the thing I did like about this was its honesty and solid advice on what to do when there are, well… no easy answers.

Not sure how the hell I missed this, but NPR, proprietors of such awesomeness as Ira Glass’ This American Life and other brain food, solicited their erudite and obviously attractive listenership for a top 100 works of scifi and fantasy books list. 5000 entries, 100 toppers.

NPR’s Top 100 SciFi and Fantasy Books

Besides the scary fact of how many of them I’ve read, I still though it was an interesting list especially in light of Neal Stephenson’s amazing article in World Policy on Innovation Starvation about how SF was failing the world now (but really a diatribe against loss of grit and big risk taking in doing Big Things™). Seriously, read it, it’s a fantastic article. Cause even though we’re living in the future, we don’t seem to be doing much about it.

The American Book Review has compiled its take on the 100 best opening lines from novels .

Call me Ishmael

Anybody think they missed any? Or think some of them don’t deserve to be there?

I’m actually chuffed I’ve read more of these books than I haven’t.

via Neatorama .

Since I’m moving moved to new digs in a new city, one of the first thing I had to do was to get a new borrowing card for the Vancouver Public Library before a scary portion of my disposable income ended up in Amazon’s pockets.

Out on the internet though, where I basically live most of my professional life, people point at Amazon when they want to reference a book - not the library. What’s a poor, environmentally and cost-conscious book lover to do ?