More Recent Reading

Nginx HTTP Server by Clement Nedelcu, published by Packt
Nginx (pronounced as 'Engine X') is a lean, mean and fast web server. It's open source, and designed to serve pages fast. We use it at work, and, while it is not as well known as Apache, and maybe not as comprehensive, you don't need a Ph.D. in chaos theory to understand and write its configuration files!
This book is an excellent, and thorough, introduction to how to set up and use the server. Nginx is a modular server and the core modules, together with the rewrite module, the server-side include module, and the SSL module are covered in sufficient depth that anyone with a reasonable level of sysadmin knowledge would be able to set up the modules properly and safely. Other 'standard' modules are covered briefly, but third party modules are not covered at all. At first I thought that was an unfortunate omission, but on reflection, given the speed with which third party modules are developing and changing, that was probably a wise decision.
Once the author has covered all the basics there are a number of interesting and useful chapters covering other related topics. One of them covers using Fast-CGI both with Python and PHP. This is excellent, and includes a basic explanation of what CGI is and how to interface and use Nginx with the PHP-FPM and python based Django frameworks. Another chapter teaches you how to use Nginx as a reverse proxy along with Apache, and a third chapter covers the tricky business of moving your web site from Apache to Nginx.
The only weird thing about this book is the first chapter, which appears to be a potted newbie's guide to Linux system administration. I've no idea why it's there, perhaps the author's contract with the publisher specified that the book had to be over 300 pages long? Most people trying to set up a web server will probably know at least some system administration. If that's the case, my advice is to start at chapter two.
I was impressed by this book (actually I was also very impressed with Nginx) and I would definitely recommend it to anyone coming to Nginx for the first time.

The Atomic Bazaar: Dispatches from the underground world of nuclear trafficking by William Langewiesche, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
This book had been sitting on my wish list for a while before I finally got hold of it and started to read it. The result was a complete overturning of my preconceptions of where the dangers of nuclear explosions lie.
The book falls fairly neatly into two parts. The first deals with the possibility of a terrorist nuclear weapon assembled from stolen materials obtained in the former Russian empire, while the second discusses Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear technology from Europe, and its spread to other nations.
The scientists who built the first atomic bomb, taking it from a theoretical concept to practical weapon, were very clear about the implications. Once it had been proved to work, building more such weapons was merely a matter of engineering - and second time around it's always easier than first time. Added to that is the fact that unlike in the west where science and engineering are not a popular career choices, the emerging nations like India, Pakistan and China have a culture in which science and engineering are high prestige professions (eight out of the top nine government officials in China have engineering or science backgrounds - both the president and the premier are engineers by trade).
For both terrorists and nation states the fundamental problem is to get their hands on fissile material - usually highly enriched uranium (HEU) - in adequate quantities. Once you have HEU, building some sort of bomb is not difficult, although realizing the full potential is a more serious engineering problem. The most likely place to get such material for terrorists is from a production facility in one of the old Russian states, and western (in practice, mostly US) security officials tend to concentrate on this. The author examines this possibility very carefully in the first part of the book and concludes, correctly in my view, that it is unlikely - not impossible - just very unlikely to happen.
The second half of the book then recounts the story of how Pakistan became a nuclear power, using stolen western technology, and how it contrived to export that technology to countries like Libya and North Korea. There isn't space to go into the story here - you need to read the book - but the conclusion is stark and unambiguous. The big cities of the Indian sub-continent, Mumbai and Rawalpindi, for instance, are much more likely to suffer the ravishes of nuclear weapons in the near future than are New York, Washington or London.
The story unfolded in this book is not a happy one. It is, however, one that deserves to be heard, and it is told in a way which makes it accessible to ordinary citizens who are not experts on global proliferation. More to the point it is told without hype or hyperbole, and with no axe to grind on the part of the author - something that's all too rare when this issue is discussed.
Highly recommended.

Blood, Iron & Gold: How the railways transformed the world
by Christian Wolmar, published by Atlantic Books
Christian Wolmar's book is as much a social and political history of the railways as it is the story - and a very readable one - of how they were built. The eclipse of the railways by motor cars in the second half of the twentieth century has obscured the extent to which railways changed the world.
In some parts of the world, Europe, for instance, they linked the cities and towns and drove trade to previously unheard of heights. In other parts of the world, and the USA is only the most obvious example, they were instrumental in creating a unified nation. In addition, railways have their own dark side. The two World Wars would have been unthinkable without the railway's ability to move men and munitions rapidly between battlefronts.
The book is a fascinating read peppered with heroes, villains and interesting stories about the rise and fall of the railways. You don't have to be a trainspotting geek to enjoy this book, just have an interest in how the past - and present - were shaped by one particular piece of technology at a particular time. All in all, a thundering good read by an author with a real passion for his subject!

Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer
by Martin Davis, published by W. W. Norton & Co
This is a nifty little book chronicling a strand of the work of western logicians over the last 300 years that culminates in the work of Alan Turing and John von Neumann, and provides the theoretical underpinnings of modern von Neumann architecture computers.
The tale starts with Gottfried Leibniz and his dream of machines that would carry out calculations in a universal mathematical language, freeing the mind for creative thought. The fact that the theory and technology for such a machine did not exist in the seventeenth century did not stop him from (unsuccessfully) trying. This was, after all the man who invented the notation for integral and differential calculus that we still use today.
The torch was then taken up by George Boole, whose achievement was to turn logic into an algebra, work which was deepened by Gottlob Frege. The next in line was Georg Cantor, whose work on sets was to provoke more than a little controversy. From there the trail leads through David Hilbert and Kurt Godel to Alan Turing and his concept of a universal computational machine - known ever after as the Turing Machine.
And, finally, we come to the end of our journey with John von Neumann, who laid down the theoretical basis for modern computers in a seminal paper that reported on the logical organization of an all-purpose computer - in this specific case EDVAC, the successor ENIAC, the very first US digital computer.
The book contains mini-biographies of all the logicians covered, and has an excellent and clear exposition of the breakthroughs they made. You don't need to be a maths wiz to understand the book (no mean achievement on the part of the author), although it would possibly be an advantage to have some understanding of logic and set theory.
An enlightening and enjoyable read.

Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach
by Cem Kaner, James Bach & Bret Pettichord, published by Wiley
I first heard about this book at a London Tester gathering which I sneaked into (I am after all a programmer, not a tester!). It's a fabulous collection of tips and hints and techniques for both the new and the experienced person working in a software test department. It covers obvious areas - testing techniques, automated testing (the material about what automated testing can't do is very high grade material), documenting testing, and managing a test project.
But it also covers some less obvious issues such as thinking like a tester, bug advocacy, and how to interact with programmers. The style is to offer the advice in bite sized chunks, and, to my surprise, it works, making it easy to look up something only half remembered, in a moment.
Even more importantly, from my point of view, the book is easily useable if you aren't a professional tester. If you are a programmer, or even the CTO, in a small company that doesn't have a software testing department, you will still get a lot of new ideas out of the book. Many of the ideas are a nice fit with programmer test driven development - some of them will work for you, some won't. Happily, the book isn't dogmatic, it's much more of a 'this is what we have found can work in some of the projects we have been involved in' style. And it works very well indeed.
Highly recommended.

The Blue Moment
by Richard Williams, published by Faber and Faber
Miles Davis's 'Kind of Blue' album was the first jazz record I ever bought. Little did I know, at the time that this mirrored most other peoples' experience - many of whom have only that one jazz record! Richard Williams book is the story of that album. It's not merely about the making of the album, although that aspect is covered.
It's about how the recording came out of a crisis in jazz and about the influence it has exerted in the jazz, rock and progressive music milieus for over 50 years. As I read this book I discovered to my fascination that many of the other musicians whose records I have in my collection are an outgrowth of the tracks Miles Davis and his group laid down in a converted church in Manhattan in 1959.
Rock groups heavily influenced by 'Kind of Blue' include the early Velvet Underground (thanks to John Cale), the first couple of Roxy Music albums (thanks to Eno), The Who (particularly the tracks 'Baba O'Riley' and 'Won't Get Fooled Again' on the 'Who's Next Album'). I guess that I now know why I liked 'Who's Next' so much and why I was so disappointed when their next album returned to more conventional rock music! 'Kind of Blue' was also the inspiration behind almost the whole ECM music catalog, and of course Soft Machine. I suspect early King Crimson fall into the same category, though that isn't specifically mentioned by Williams.
If you're not a musician (I'm not), then I suspect that some of the more technical explanations of what is happening in the songs will probably go past you, but don't let that put you off, the book is a great story about an interesting cultural phenomenon of the last 50 years.
Recommended.

Berlin: The Downfall 1945
by Antony Beevor, published by Penguin
Antony Beevor is one of the best military historians of the current period. As always his blend of strategic, operational, tactical and personal makes for compelling and scary reading. And the fall of Berlin at the hands of the soviet Union was very scary indeed. Beevor doesn't pull any punches in his discussion of the principals, whether it be Eisenhower's failure to understand the importance of the west securing Berlin for the post war shape of Europe, or the systematic tolerance of gang rape by the Soviet military and political leadership.
The result is classic Beevor, a knowledgeable description and analysis of the military campaign, mostly in the East, interspersed with reminiscences from those caught up in it.
Highly recommended.

Measuring America
by Andro Linklater, published by Harper Collins
As a kid I often wondered, looking at my atlas, just how they got all those straight lines on the maps. Later I came to understand that in places like Africa, it was done by bureaucrats drawing lines on maps. But what about America? In the USA, most of the states were created long after the colonies won their independence in the American Revolution. Thus, when I saw this book in a pile on a table in a bookshop, I jumped at the chance to read it.
And I wasn't disappointed! Around the story of how those lines were created by surveyors using a 22 yard long chain (aka Gunters chain) Andro Linklater spins a fascinating story. That 22 yards was critical, it governed everything from the size of lots for sale, to the width of roads in cities. But the beauty of book is not just about how the measurements were actually made, although there are plenty of stories of that endeavour, it's about the struggle to impose a new way of measuring (the metric system) on ordinary people, and their resistance to it. It's also about how land was turned into property, Federal property in the case of the USA - which led to the biggest land sale in the history of the world.
The problem is, you see, that the traditional measures make it easy to divide things up, while the metric system makes it easy to count. Two completely different problems. In addition the traditional ways are all tuned to a human scale, while metric units can go from the very small, less than the size of an atom, to the very large distances used by astronomy. No surprise that metric was the favoured measuring system of the scientists!
The struggle started with the American Revolution - Thomas Jefferson's original proposals for the new United States included not only the creation of the dollar, the method for creating new states and how they should be surveyed, but also a new, decimal based, set of standard weights and measures. The new weights and measures proposal got mysteriously lost during the period while Jefferson was in Paris as the Minister of the United States.
The struggle, I notice, continues to this day in both the USA and the UK...
All in all an excellent read.

jQuery Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach
By B. M. Harwani, published by Apress
Cookbook/Recipe style books seem to be all the rage at the moment. Although I prefer reference books, I do find the cookbook style useful for things that I don't do very often, and this book was no exception. I would emphasize, though, that it's not a book you could really use to learn how to use the library.
jQuery is one of the most widely used JavaScript libraries and the book provides solutions to a wide range of the problems you are likely to encounter. The books starts out with the basics - selecting and using the DOM, and moves on to more complex situations from there. I found the form validation examples, and the event handling material particularly useful.
Each entry consists of a statement of the problem, followed by a solution, and then a longer or shorter explanation and discussion of how and why the solution works. The stuff I used out of the book worked just fine, with no errors. Obviously, I didn't use everything, but the quality of the code provided seemed fine to me.
I was, however, a bit disappointed by the quality of the book production. The paper it's printed on is rather low quality, and some of the fonts used in displaying sample output are reproduced in very small type, making it difficult to read. Overall the level of graphic design leaves something to be desired. Fortunately, the content manages to overcome this handicap.
I found it useful, but I suspect this is partly a matter of taste. Ten years ago I would have recommended dropping into your nearest computer bookshop and browsing through this book and the O'Reilly equivalent to see which one is more to your taste. Sadly the dominance of Amazon has ended the possibility of this sort of activity, as well as the possibility of serendipity in the finding of books you never knew existed.

C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 by Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield. Prentice Hall
Qt is a C++ cross platform library. It started out as a GUI library, but it has long outgrown that, and it's starting to look more and more like a comprehensive cross platform framework. It's also gaining new features very fast, which is something of a problem for any author.
None the less, this book will provide application programmers with a solid foundation when they come to use Qt. When I did a comparative review of Qt books last year, I didn't have access to this book. However, I recently used a colleague's copy at work, and found it so much more useful, and comprehensive, than my other Qt books, including the earlier edition of this book, that I bought my own copy out of my first paycheck! What better recommendation could you want?
This book is a must for those who need to use the entire framework, since it covers far more than just the GUI, including multithreading, networking (note, though, that it doesn't cover using the QNetAccessManager, which arrived after the book went to print), 3D graphics, using databases, and extending Qt programs with Javascript.
The one real weakness of the book, probably caused by the rapid development of the framework, is that the GUI material basically assumes that the reader wants to program the GUI facilities directly instead of using Designers and/or Creator. I've noticed that there is a little bit of snobbishness in the Qt community, with the old guard maintaining that the only way to work in Qt is via direct programming. Hopefully the next edition of the book will teach GUI programming via the Creator IDE, and the Designer. Lets just see if we can break the 'real programmers program in noughts and ones' attitude in parts of the community :)
So would I recommend this book? Wholeheartedly. My current job has taken me into realms of the Qt framework I've never used before, and this book enabled me to get up speed very fast under a schedule that was very, very, tight.
Highly recommended.

Slack by Tom DeMarco. Dorset House
Another superb piece of work from the legendary Tom DeMarco. The book, as he so aptly puts it, is for people who don't have time to read it, so it's designed to take the length of a flight from New York to Chicago to read.
For all that it's short, it's packed with good advice. The central thesis is that many modern corporations are unable to respond to changes in the marketplace because they are now completely optimised for what they already do and sell, and have pared the staff down to a minimum which gives them what they believe is total efficiency.
The problem is that this leaves no one, especially the middle management, at whom the book is especially aimed, with any time for innovation when something comes along which undermines the current way of doing business.  Along the way the book looks at Busyness, Burnout, Aggressive schedules, leadership, and risk, to name but a few topics covered.
This book is a great read for anyone interested in modern business, but I'd especially recommend it for anyone who is just starting to take up management responsibilities.
Highly recommended.

Armageddon by Max Hastings. Pan Books
This is a war book with a difference, covering the last eight months of the Second World War in Europe. Unlike most of its peers it is a story not just of generals and battles, but of the suffering that goes with modern warfare, and an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the various armies.
If you want a blow-by-blow account of the various battles of this period, Arnhem, the Oder crossing, the Battle of the Bulge, and lesser known, but no less lethal affairs such as Hurtgen Forest, then this is not the book for you. If you want to get some idea of what it was like to live and fight in northern Europe in the last months of the war, then I can't recommend a better book.
The book makes extensive use of eyewitness accounts from the civilians, soldiers, airmen, and prisoners to build a portrait of suffering that I have rarely previously encountered. As a game designer who has previously had a war game published, I've always worried about the inability of computer games to give an indication of what modern warfare means in human terms. This book brings it home in no uncertain fashion.
The book also makes an interesting assessment of how the different armies fought, and why they fought in the fashion they did. I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions, but I think they represent an important contribution to a debate that deserves more airing. Having said that, there is a definite tendency to preach. Hastings has a very clear set of political views, and in this aspect of the book he is clearly wants his view to prevail. Even so, as long as the reader is aware of this, Hastings' contribution to the debate is very valuable.
Recommended.

Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox by Victoria Finlay. Sceptre
I got this book in a special hardback edition as part of my membership of the Folio Society, but the text is the same as the commercially available edition.
This isn't a book I would have bought unless I happened to find it while browsing in a bookshop, and I started reading it in the rather desultory way in which one does when given a book for free.
It didn't take long to get hooked! It's a collection of stories about the author's search for how the natural colours used for dye are made  - going through each colour of the rainbow in turn.
The first synthetic dyes were invented 150 years ago and, as Ms Finlay discovered, that's long enough for the making of the original, organic dyes to have died out. However, in most cases, persistence paid off and she was able to visit the original sources and discover the stories behind the processes.
I learned a lot from this book, which is one you can either just dip into for individual tales, or read at length straight through. I would be happy to recommend it to anyone with an enquiring mind.

The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A history of modern Tibet since 1947 by Tsering Shakya. Pimlico
I was very impressed with this book. It is one of the few books about modern history that I've read which tries to lay out the motivations of both sides in the conflict. That's not to say that the book does not take a stand - it is firmly pro-Tibet.
However, only by understanding the motivations of the Chinese can you understand why it is that after 50 years of Communist Chinese occupation - three generations, effectively - they have failed to stabilise the situation and wean the Tibetans away from their culture and religion.
In laying out the Chinese motivations, and tactical blunders and successes of the Tibetan leadership, the author succeeds magnificently. At the end of the book, while the reader's sympathy will undoubtedly lie with the much abused Tibetans, there will also be an understanding of why the Beijing government has plowed such enormous resources, both human and hard cash, into the area over the past 50 years. Significantly, the reader will also have some idea of the way in which western governments deliberately hindered the attempts by the Tibetans to internationalise their plight.
The only very minor criticism I have is that a preliminary chapter giving a brief outline of the history of Tibet prior to 1947 would have been useful. Tibet, a bit like Poland in Europe, seems to be one of those countries that is fated to emerge into history as an independent entity at intervals, only to be seized by one of its more powerful neighbours and vanish again for a while.
Highly recommended.

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