More Recent Reading

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.

Rome & Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations by Martin Goodman. Penguin Books
This book was recommended to me some time ago, but I had put off buying it because it covers the period extending from 37 BC to 312 AD. Not my usual stamping ground when it comes to history. In the event it was, indeed, well worth a read.
The author's purpose is to examine the reasons for the rebellion of the Jews and the destruction of the temple by the Romans in 70 AD. However, what appealed to me in this book is the explanation of the social, economic, and political world of the Roman Empire and the Mediterranean in this period. The detail is fantastic (I've seen criticism that it's too detailed, but this is what made it for me), and for the first time I gained an understanding of how Rome 'worked'.
On the Jewish side, grasping things would have been more difficult had I not had someone to ask. For instance I didn't realise that the temple in Jerusalem was literally the only temple sanctioned, and that once it was destroyed there was no roll for priests. I think the Jewish coverage assumes some background in Jewish culture.
Despite this I'd really recommend it to anyone interested in obtaining a comprehensive social history of the Mediterranean at the start of the first century.

id: The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century by Susan Greenfield. Sceptre
I was in two minds about whether to comment on this book. I thought it was amazing, but I don't feel competent to know how much is the author's own theories, and how must is accepted wisdom in the field. However I felt it deserved a review
What professor Greenfield is trying to do is to look at the changes modern media is making to the brain and what they mean in terms of how we define our own identity. Pundits have already spotted the shorter attention span and multi-tasking that is now common among Western youth. The author, a brilliant neuroscientist, relates this to what it seems to mean in terms of brain structure.
Even though I had the experience of hearing her speak at the 2009 ACCU Conference (the ten minute lecture for computer programmers on the latest advances in neuroscience had to be heard to be believed!), I'm still struggling with some of the concepts the book introduces. That's my fault not hers, though.
In spite of that, I found this book a real tonic, and an antidote to the superficial crud peddled by the popular press. It also held out great hope for how we can build our identity consciously in the future, rather than walking blindly into someone else's definition of what we should be.
It's not light reading, but then nothing truly worth while is easy! Recommended.

The Little Ice Age by Brian Fagan. Basic books
Roughly speaking, the Little Ice Age lasted from 1300 through to around 1850. This fascinating little book looks at the consequences of that event, without being at all deterministic. It also explains, in layman's terms, the hydrodynamics of the oceans as we currently understand them.
The result is a fascinating synthesis of climatology, history, sociology, and politics. It also sets the current extended warm period in rather more context than it normally gets in the press. I really enjoyed reading this book, which although about climate, sets people at the center of its story.  I know quite a lot about European history, especially social and political history in the later part of  the period covered. However, this book gave me a completely new perspective on the events of that period, giving me a much more rounded picture.
Recommended

Professional Multicore Programming by Cameron Hughes & Tracy Hughes. Wrox/Wiley
I wasn't very impressed by this book. A third of it is Appendices - mostly pThreads material lifted from the ISO POSIX standard. The remainder of the book is very bitty. A lot of the book is about multi-process work, rather than multi-threaded work, and potential readers should be aware that the book concentrates on pThreads and Unix.
The application design material is very formalistic, and doesn't really deal with the role of parallel algorithms. Anyone using this book would be able to, with a bit of effort, pick up the basics of using pThreads, but I doubt if they would be able to start to understand how to do much more than add a bit of not very efficient multi-threading into their code.
Not recommended.

Intel Threaded Building Blocks by James Reinders. O'Reilly
First the disclaimer - the book was one of a number that the author gave away to participants, after giving a short seminar at the 2009 ACCU Conference.
That said, I found the book fascinating - hard but fascinating. There's nothing wrong with the writing. The subject matter is just difficult for anyone used to sequential programming (that's most programmers). Intel's threaded building blocks are a C++ library for parallel, using parallel algorithms, rather than threads.
You won't find much here to help you with multi-threaded programming, but you will find a whole new way of thinking, which, if you apply the methods to your program right from the start, will simplify programs that want (or need) to take advantage of the new generation of multi-core processors.
This book really stretched the way in which I think about programming, while allowing me to continue building on my existing core of C++ skills, something I haven't encountered in many books recently.
Highly recommended!

China - Fragile Superpower by Susan L Shirk. Oxford University Press
This is an interesting book. Ms Shirk was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for relations with China in the Clinton administration. As such she has a more informed insight into China than most. Her basic thesis is straightforward; the current generation of Chinese leaders do not have the accumulated authority of Mao, Zhou Enlai or the other revolutionary leaders. This means that they feel their domestic position is much more insecure than earlier leaders.
This insecurity, together with the effects of the economic restructuring that has taken place in the last 15 years, means that the leadership need to take more hard line nationalist positions than they would otherwise have chosen, in times of crisis. Add to this the difficulty in restricting news in the era of cellphones and the internet, and the nationalism of the masses. Once you've done that you can easily envisage the possibility of every international incident causing a major domestic crisis.
The book analyses recent events in the light of these ideas. Unfortunately this produces a very narrow way of looking at China, which is compounded by a lack of feeling for the wider Chinese history, and an absence of analysis about the fact that the current politburo membership is made up of trained engineers, rather than traditional politicians.
I think that the book is well written, well argued, and well worth reading, but it shouldn't be the only book you read on modern China.

The Tiger that Isn't by Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot. Profile Books
This nifty little book is a gem. Using dodgy statistics from politicians, newspapers and the UK government, it teaches the reader how to figure out what all those numbers really mean. I'm pretty much into numbers myself, but I learned a massive amount from reading this entertaining book.
The book covers the gamut of techniques used to bamboozle the public on a daily basis - size, counting, chance, averages, risk, data and causation, to mention only a few. Along the way readers will learn why most people have more legs than average, why targets distort work processes, and how sampling affects the immigration figures.
I really enjoyed reading this book, and I'd happily recommend it to anyone who wants to find out what the numbers behind the headlines really mean.
Highly recommended.

The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton. Profile Books
This book has been sitting on my desk for some weeks. I finished it a while ago, but wasn't sure how to review it, because I'm not sure exactly what the author's thesis is. The sub-title, 'Technology and Global History since 1900' accurately sums up the content; it is almost an alternative history brought about by making a clear separation between technology and innovation.
Given this separation, the book points out that virtually all the innovations of the last century are based on technology dating back to the start of the twentieth century. It's a neat idea, well researched and backed up. At that level it's a good read and a new perspective on technology and innovation.
At the end of the day, though, the author doesn't really draw out any conclusions from his work, leaving the reader feeling frustrated and wondering what was in the author's mind.

Nemesis by Max Hastings. Harper Perennial
This account of the 1944-45 World War II battles against Japan is something of a tour de force by Max Hastings. Drawn from interviews and the papers of those who participated, it presents both sides of the story, but without falling into moral ambivalence. Even more importantly, it does not look at the decisions made at the time solely from hindsight - it looks at them within the context in which they were made.
Many of the things that happened then become more explicable - not necessarily condonable, but certainly explicable, including Japanese atrocities against those they conquered, and the much debated decision to drop the atom bomb.
Two things which I hadn't previously understood became clear from a reading of this book. The first was that all of the people involved at a high level with the dropping of the bomb failed to understand the qualitative difference between conventional and nuclear explosive. They all thought it was just a bigger and better version of what the B-29 bombers were already doing to Japanese cities.
The second was the extent to which high ranking Japanese military and civilians privately knew the war was lost, but because of the warrior cult of bushido, were unable to express this publicly.
The B-29 bombing campaign and the submarine blockade had already massively reduced the ability of the Japanese to produce war materiel. However, Hasting's conclusion is that the Russian invasion of Japanese occupied China and Korea, and the dropping of the atom bomb were necessary to force the Japanese surrender. The atom bomb was necessary to convince the civilians in government that they should surrender, the Russian invasion to force the army to face the fact that it had lost.
Not everyone will agree with this idea, but it is well argued, and cannot be ignored.
Recommended

Imaginary Futures by Richard Barbrook. Pluto Press
Subtitled 'From Thinking Machines to the Global Village', this is a really unusual and interesting book. It's about the political and philosophical lineage of the Internet. Beginning with the 1964 New York World's Fair, it traces the Cold War origins of the politics which gave rise to the Internet.
For Barbrook the work on cybernetics by Norbert Weiner and John von Neumann fused with the 'global village' concept developed by Marshall McLuhan provided the impetus for the eventual development of the Internet. This was elaborated on by a group of former left wing intellectuals including such luminaries as Walt Rostow, J.K. Galbraith, and Daniel Bell who were able to turn it into a vision of an American future that would compete with that of the Cold War enemy - Russia.
The book charts the history of the ideas and actions of this group through to its discrediting through the denouement of the Vietnam War. It also covers - unfortunately all to briefly - how the ideology was co-opted and resuscitated by Californian neo-cons via Wired magazine.
I suspect Barbrook's left wing analysis, and some of his assumptions, will make American readers feel uncomfortable. In addition, I feel that the analysis has a touch of one-dimensionality about it. Nonetheless, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone interested in an analysis of the Internet's political pre-history.

Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers. Prentice Hall
The biggest single problem I had when I moved from working for myself as a programmer back to the mainstream was dealing with other people's code. For nearly twenty years I only had to deal with my own code. Suddenly I had to understand and change other people's code. It was quite a culture shock, and one of the most difficult things I've done.
I wish I'd found Michael's book earlier, it would have helped ease the transition. Of course, not everyone else's code is legacy code, but even if you are not handling true 'legacy' code, this book will help you deal with the problems you face.
The book is in three parts. The first is a discussion of how you go about changing software that is badly structured and has complex interactions and side effects. Where do you start, and how do you make sure that you don't break things further down the convoluted chain of dependencies. The answer to the latter, of course, is testing, testing, testing, and the author makes a good enough case to persuade even the most sloth like to get into the testing mode.
The second part of the book is organised almost like an FAQ with chapters devoted to common problems like 'I don't understand the code well enough to change it'. This one crops up all too often, and is an excellent example of how the author doesn't avoid difficult questions. The final part of the book is a useful catalog of mostly pattern based techniques that can be used to break dependencies.
The book is well written and features clear examples that are written in either C++, Java, C and C#, and the problems caused by the different features, or lack of them, available to the different languages are discussed and work arounds suggested. I enjoyed reading this book.
Highly recommended!

The Mystery of Capital by Hermando De Soto. Black Swan Books
I had high hopes of this book, since I'd come across mention of it in a number of different books read previously. In the event I was somewhat disappointed. It wasn't that I massively disagreed with the book. It was more that I fell asleep while reading it! The problem is that Mr de Soto seems to have been told that you only teach one thing at a time and repeat it in at least three different ways. This may be true talking in a classroom, but in a book it leads rapidly to terminal boredom.
The central theme of the book is simple - the reason while capitalism has not taken off outside the west is not that people are somehow lazy (quite to the contrary) but that legal and property systems do not allow them to use their property to obtain liquid capital. I don't disagree, but I think this is a one-dimensional view. I'm always dubious about single cause explanations for economic and social phenomena, and this idea is no exception. Yes, lack of legal property is an important part of the problem, but it's not the only one, and a more rounded view of the problems involved is needed to resolve them.

Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML by David Schultz and Craig Cook. Apress
The useful book is both a beginner's introduction and a reference book. One particularly useful feature is that the elements are fully defined in the body of the book as you learn about them, and then they are all brought together, alphabetically in Appendices. This allows the book to be used as a fast reference when you have finished it.
XHTML and CSS are covered pretty thoroughly, as are forms, tables and image maps. There is a brief discussion of client side scripting with JavaScript, but I would hesitate to use the technique on production code without looking at a more in depth book on the subject. This book is, as the title implies, a book for beginners. I doubt that a web developer with experience would get much out of it. On the other hand it's refreshing to find a book for beginners that doesn't talk down to its readers, or treat them as dummies!
Recommended

The Definitive Guide to SQLite by Michael Owens. Apress
I recently decided that it was long overdue time for me to start moving the databases in my programs away from Sleepycat's Berkeley DB (recently purchased by Oracle, whom I don't trust) to SQL databases. Since I wanted built-in databases, SQLite seemed to be the only serious contender. I didn't really have much experience with SQL databases, so I needed a comprehensive book that would teach me about SQL as well as this specific database.
Michael Owens' book didn't disappoint me. It gave me a solid grounding in SQL and taught me how to use SQLite efficiently. The SQL material covers both relational theory and the actual language, while the SQLite specific material covers the use of the 'C' API, and the internals of how SQLite works. I doubt that most people would be likely to do programming at the latter level, but a knowledge of what goes on 'under the hood' makes it easier to program at a higher level. Comprehensive appendices cover an SQL alphabetical reference, and all the 'C' API functions.
I liked this book and thought it was well worth the money I paid for it.
Highly recommended.

Snipers, Shills & Sharks by Ken Steiglitz. Princeton University Press
This is a book not about eBay per se, but about auctions - their history and how they work, both from a technical and sociological and psychological angle. The reader will learn all about how auctions work and how eBay actiually works, which is something many of its users don't understand.
The explanations are clear and well written, the mathematics banished to a number of appendicies. I was impressed by this book and I learned a lot about auctions and human behaviour from it. I'd recommend it to anyone who uses ebay, or other on-line auction sites, regularly - you may be surprised at what your optimal strategies are!
Recommended.

Useless Arithemtic by Orrin H Pilkey & Linda Pilkey-Jarvis. Columbia University Press
Sub-titled 'Why environmental scientists can't predict the future', this book is a devastating survey of the consequnces of relying on quantative mathematic modelling to make environmental predictions.
The bulk of the book is a series of case studies covering the collapse of the Grand banks fishery (once the world greatest fish supply), Yucca mountain proposed nuclear waste repository, the rise in sea level, predictions of beach geology, open cast mine pollution predictions, and invasive plants.
The results make for a terrifying indictment of our attempts to predict futre events from mathematical model of past events. Time and again the models have been proved wrong, but with fudge factors added to get the politically 'correct' predictions, the reasons for the glaring failures are never analysed.
The discussions and explanations are easy for the non-mathematicians to follow, and for those with a maths bent there is a section at the end which gives the mathematics of the models.
Highly recommended.

Iron Kingdom by Christopher Clark, Penguin
Christopher Clark's history of Prussia is, to say the least, comprehensive. It's also interesting, covering as it does the whole period from 1600 until the end of World War II. Occasionally, it gets a little dry, but most of the time it is a well written portrayal of not just the royal court, but also of peasants, burgers, aristos, merchants and the emerging of the working class.
Although the book charts the rise and eventual fall of the Hohenzollern dynasty, it does so within the framework of the geopolitics of a state that was peculiarly vulnerable to attack for most of its existence. It also traces the two influences that defined the Prussian state - militarism and a progressive and enlightened liberalism.
Fascinating, and fundamental to understanding the 20th Century history of Europe.

Learning PHP and MySQL (2nd ed) by Michele E Davis & Jon A Phillips
This is an adequate, though uninspired, look through the basics of using PHP and MySQL to build dynamic web sites. Because it is trying to cover two major topics from a starter level it is unable to treat either in the depth needed for the reader to become fluent in either the use of SQL databases, or PHP.
However, the book also suffers from a serious flaw which renders it unfit to be used by those wishing to learn the subjects involved. The sample code is frequently incorrect, and this will cause endless confusion for newcomers. It is clear that insufficient attention has been paid to making sure the code is correct, which would seem to indicate that the authors haven't even tried to run the code they present. What the editors at O'Reilly were thinking of when they let this go through, I really don't know.
Not recommended.

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Penguin
The art of the sustained polemic is not dead! In an age where bland agreement with the current fad is 'in', Nicholas Taleb has written a book that not only takes apart the pretensions of the market traders and other would-be oracles, but also reintroduces robustness into debate.
Some people won't like the style, of course. That's sad, because they will also be missing a very informative book. It really does tell you a lot about randomness in life, what it means, and possible strategies for dealing with it.
As a computer programmer I was particularly struck by the discussion of how easy it is to mistake noise for signal by looking at phenomena at the wrong scale. That's a small part of the discussion though, others will find nuggets relating to their own experience as they read through the book.
I liked this book. I liked the irreverence - arrogance even - with which Taleb dispatches his enemies, and turns 'common sense' upside down.
Highly recommended.

The Last Man Who Knew Everything by Andrew Robinson. Oneworld Publications
I found this book really interesting. It is a biography of Thomas Young, famous for both his modulus of elasticity, and for the double slit experiment which established the wave behaviour of light.
Young was a both a polymath and an autodidact, and his achievements are much wider than just the two items named after him. He was the first person to correctly explain how the eye worked, and he was instrumental in the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.
Andrew Robinson's book deals not only with Young's triumphs, but also with the frustrations of being a polymath on the edge of a time when specialisation was on its way in. Previously, scientists were gentlemen of means who had the time and the money to dabble in any number of fields that interested them. After Young, scientific research became a field for paid professionals with narrow specialities. Polymaths tended to be good at a large number of things, but not the absolute best in any of them. Of course, their ability to bring together disparate fields also enabled them to found new branches of science and the arts, but such achievements were usually not recognised until after their lifetime.
Robinson has produced a very readable book about someone whose achievements have been overshadowed by those who came later.
Recommended.

The Lion and the Unicorn by Richard Aldous. Pimlico (Random House)
This magnificent account of the rivalry between Gladstone and Disraeli is a revelation for anyone who, like me, thought history was a boring list of kings and queens. The book brings to life the role and functioning of the British parliament in the 19th century, which was, in general, dominated by the wealthy, and run in their interests.
And who 'won'? Well Gladstone outlived Disraeli, and became prime minister several times after Disraeli's death. Disraeli's legacy was the idea that the job of the opposition should be to oppose the government, and he laid down the foundations of the modern Conservative Party, and developed the 'One Nation' ideology that kept it as the natural party of government for near a hundred years.
Gladstone left a Liberal Party severely split over the issue of Irish Home Rule, and doomed within twenty years to be squeezed out between the confident Conservatives and the growing electoral power of the Labour party. On the other hand he did give his name to the gladstone bag!
Queen Victoria survived them both. She adored Disraeli and despised Gladstone. In fact her comment on the two of them makes a fitting epitaph: 'When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr Gladstone I thought he was the cleverest man in England, but after sitting next to Mr Disraeli I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.'
A really good read.

Implementing a Digital Asset Management System by Jens Jacobsen, et al. Focal Press.
I bought this book to bring myself back up to speed on DAM after a few years hiatus. It proved to be just what I needed, working systematically through requirements, analysis and implementation. The product overview at the end is a little dated (the book was published in 2005), but is still a good start for investigating possible products to use.
Note that this book is not about writing a DAM system. It's about analysing what is needed and then using off the shelf software (possibly customised) to implement the solution.
Definitely worth considering if you need to do some work in this area.

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