Tal Cohen's Bookshelf: A Collection of Personal Opinions about Books

Fiction

Science Fiction

Non-Fiction

Computer Science

Book In-Jokes
The Fiction Collection
“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

The Science Fiction Collection
“A wild dream and a far one -- but no wilder and no farther than some of the dreams of man.”
Clifford D. Simak, City

The Non-Fiction Collection
“That's the reason they're called lessons: because they lessen from day to day.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Computer Science Collection
“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 Log Book Reviews: Fiction Science-Fiction Book Reviews Non-Fiction Book Reviews Computer Science Book Reviews
[1998-09-30]

Could it possibly be that modern communication networks lead us to one of those rare crossroads between really far-fetched science-fiction and reality? In Darwin Among the Machines, George B. Dyson speculates that huge-scale non-human intelligence will inevitably evolve around us. Plus, the book is a refreshing history of both computing and evolution science.
[Non-Fiction]
Read more... Comments so far: 2

[1998-06-21]

Ray Bradbury is a master storyteller with a very rich imagination. His book Driving Blind is a collection of four old and seventeen new short stories.
[Fiction]
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[1998-06-17]

Simon Singh describes the fascinating story of the riddle that confounded the world’s greatest minds for 358 years, in Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem.
[Non-Fiction]
Read more... Comments so far: 2

[1998-04-24]

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.
[Computer Science]
Read more... Comments so far: 10

[1998-04-20]

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.
[Computer Science]
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[See earlier reviews]
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