“I wonder... What's in a book while it's closed... Because as soon as I open it, there's a whole story with people I don't know yet and all kinds of adventure and deeds and battles... All those things are somehow shut up in a book. But it's already there, that's the funny thing. I just wish I knew how it could be.”
Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
“A wild dream and a far one -- but no wilder and no farther than some of the dreams of man.”
“That's the reason they're called lessons: because they lessen from day to day.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
“Think of a computer program. Somewhere, there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an infinite address space. What happens when the brackets collapse? Where's the final “END IF”? Is any of this making sense?”
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
Book In-Jokes
Here I try to maintain a list of book in-jokes: little jokes that most readers won't notice, hidden in otherwise serious books (for more about
what "in-jokes" are, see at the end of the list).
I'll need your help: if you find any such in-jokes, let me know. Please include the word “injoke” in the subject.
The books are listed in no particular order.
Book Reviews / Read LogBook Reviews: FictionScience-Fiction Book ReviewsNon-Fiction Book ReviewsComputer Science Book Reviews
[2006-12-03]
So you think you’re a good programmer? Try facing Programming Challenges, “the programming contest training manual”, if you’d like to test this belief.
Transact-SQL is Microsoft’s variant of the SQL laguage, implemented in Microsoft SQL Server. While Microsoft’s documentation might get you up and running with the product, you need a copy of The Guru’s Guide to Transact-SQL to become a real expert.
Not one of the many new pattern catalogs, John Vlissides’s Pattern Hatching show how patterns are applied in real life — and also includes some interesting guidelines for would-be pattern writers.
Geoffrey James’s The Tao of Programming is not a computer science book per se; however, only real programmers will understand its beautiful, subtle humor. The two less-known sequels, The Zen of Programming and Computer Parables are also reviewed.
Have you had enough arrows and bubbles in your documentation? If you’re trying to put some order into class diagrams, the modeling language UML, out to replace OMT and many other notations, is the current tool of choice. Together with Kendall Scott, Martin Fowler had written a great introduction to the language: UML Distilled: Applying the Standard Object Modeling Language.
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