“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
[1999-03-06]
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.
We’ve come a long way from From invisible inks and secret codes, but cryptography still plays a very important role in war — and secret love affairs. Bruce Schneier’s second edition of Applied Cryptography forms a great introduction and a handy refernce to the computer-based art of cryptography.
As programs are becoming beasts of astonishing complexity, issues of Engineering in software are gaining importance. The Mythical Man-Month, one of the best-known books on the subject, was written over twenty years ago by Fred Brooks. The Twentieth Anniversary Edition shows that little has in fact changed.
C++ sneaked object-orientation into many software shops without making them dump their existing C codebase. As the industry rapidly moves to pure object-oriented languages, the 2nd edition of Meyer’s Object-Oriented Software Construction is practically a must-read for all serious software engineers.
How many times did you find yourself solving the same program design problem for the Nth time? The book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, by “the Gang of Four”, was the first book to address the issue of patterns in software design.
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