The Goldfish Chronicles

One of my current books at the moment is Damian Conway’s Perl Best Practices. I’ve been trying to play with Python more recently, but this book jumped into my arms from the first moment I saw it at the bookshop. Conway is a great author (his OO Perl book was a great read too), and after only 100 pages this is already the 2nd book any budding Perl programmer should read after Learning Perl.

Even if you’re more experienced with Perl, read this book. I suspect the rest of the book will be as good as the first 100 pages have been, lots of tiny tidbits of Perl information and for those of use who don’t use the various libraries as much as we should, lots of information on the useful libraries that out there.

Plus he slips various Perl 6 libraries that can be used already in.

Probably the best ‘blog’ on the web nowadays is the BBC’s world affairs editor’s column. John Simpson has been reporting the news on the BBC for as long as I can remember, and his opinions on Iraq and the Pope have been a breath of fresh air. He does a superb job of hitting the impartial reporting spot that the Beeb is meant to exist to do, and the entries are informative and compelling.

It’s a huge coup for the news.bbc.co.uk site, a major member of the TV side of things getting involved with the new way of doing things. Now if only it had its own RSS feed, I would be able to truly call it a blog.

Just noticed that Bookpool is having a 43% off sale on open-source books from all publishers.

Usually they jjust do it per publisher, so this is a cool new idea that I’m sure many of us will be interested in.

As many of us programmers are, I’m a sci-fi fan. I think I started programming before I started reading sci-fi, but it’s a very tricky call. Do books about Tobias the cat, witches and magic count? Just when did my early forays into BBC Basic become programming and not just copying from the book.

As I’ve gotten older, my voracious appetite for sci-fi has diminished a touch, assisted by my having read many of the greats. So I was overjoyed to spend Saturday afternoon reading Robert Sawyer’s Calculating God cover to cover in a few hours. For a long time my top 50 favourite books has been relatively unchallenged, but this book leaps in there, possibly into the top 30.

Sawyer has a successful series about Neanderthals in a parallel universe, but it’s relatively tame. Calculating God is far more visionary and reminds me of reading Stephen Baxter’s work a couple of years ago. (In fact, Baxter has a relatively tame series too, about mammoths that is perfect for kids).

Reading the best of both authors reminds me of when I first discovered Asimov. I highly recommend.

This may have been happening for a while, but I just noticed that the O’Reilly Eclipse book is published on Safari before it is marked as available at Amazon.

Usually books seemed to take a little while to appear on Safari, and Amazon often seemed to be about the first group to get print books. Hard to tell from this end of the wire, but such prompt releases help to increase the benefit of Safari.

One thing that O’Reilly, and many others, do seem odd on is that Amazon will have a page up before O’Reilly do. O’Reilly’s forthcoming (someday) JUnit book is one such book. Amazon even have a picture. O’Reilly don’t seem to mention it as existing.

[http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/junit/ does however exist, it’s just blocked]

I’ve put a commentary on the projects in the Jakarta Commons Sandbox up at generationjava.com.

Basically an attempt to provide an overview of the sandbox and not just those which happen to be shown on the website.

An article at Java.net contains an interview with Richard Gabriel and discusses the idea that Coding is an art/craft and not a science.

So who is it that argues with this? The brainwashed minions of the education system?

It’s why I like to call myself a ‘Coder’ and not a ‘Software Engineer’, ‘Programmer’ or ‘Data Analyst’ or such. Coder’s are artists, the rest are brainwashed misplaced engineers.

[Additionally, I have the same beliefs of Mathematics. It is an Art not a Science].

Wow, a new book by Richard Bartle, the guy who created the first MUD.

Just a quick note, after all that blogging about the conference. MacTech is a magazine I discovered in the UK. No idea if I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s a US-based Mac programming magazine I’ve not discovered before. Very very good. My first issue from my subscription arrived yesterday, and as many of the Java people out there are also OS X people, I thought they might be interested.

Url for the magazine is: http://www.mactech.com and the US subscription price is 47 dollars per year.

I do hope Samir realises it’s meant to be ‘tid-bits’ and is prepared to offer us some good Java porn [or ornithology]

http://www.freeroller.net/page/samirkulkarni/