LA.NET [EN] : Books

Asking feedback for ASP.NET book

luisabreu — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:35:22 GMT

This is a post to my Portuguese readers (ie, for those guys and gals that have read my Portuguese books). I’m still preparing material for a possible ASP.NET 4.0 book and I would really appreciate some feedback on the previous editions (that is, if you read the book). What did you like? What didn’t you like? What would you like to see covered?

If you want, you can put your comments in Portuguese. Thanks for your help.

Book review: The back of the napkin

luisabreu — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:43:56 GMT

This was one of the books I’ve read during my summer vacations. Dan Roam tries to show us how we can use visual thinking to solve problems. I found it interesting and enlightening, though I must confess that I still haven’t tested all of his ideas in my day-to-day work. Overall, I’m giving it 7.5/10.

Book review: the design and evolution of C++

luisabreu — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:53:18 GMT

I’ve just finished re-reading (I’ve read if for the first time around 2000) this fantastic book which was written by Bjarne Stroustrup, who is the responsible for the design of C++. I haven’t used C++ professionally for over 6 years now! However, I’ve always been fascinated for its power and complexity and I do intend to start using it again really soon (btw, my first professional gig as a dev consisted in writing C++ code and that’s probably why I’ve got some affection for the language).

One of the reasons I enjoy this kind of book is because I’m always curious to understand why option A was preferred over B for a specific feature. And Bjarne does an excellent work on that area with this book. He goes all the way back to the roots of C++ (I’m too young to remember it being called C with classes) and explains all the rationale that is behind all the major decisions taken during C++ design and evolution. If you’re looking for a book that teaches you how to program with C++, then this isn’t really for you. However, if you’re puzzled about some C++ feature or if you think that something shouldn’t really work the way it does, then this book is for you (I’m positive that you’ll see that your idea wouldn’t really work in some specific scenario which gets used by 0.05% of the guys that use C++ :) ).

My score: 9/10.

Book review: Code, the hidden language of computer hardware and software

luisabreu — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:12:25 GMT

One of the books I’ve read during my vacations was Code: the Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, by famous author Charles Petzold. Even though this is a 2000 book, it was only in 2009 that I did find some time to read it. And let me tell you right away: it was worth it!

Anyone can read this book and end up understanding how computers work (at least, at a high level). Notice that Petzold doesn’t only talk about computers…no, he goes all the way back and talks about several inventions which contributed, in one way or another, to the construction of the modern computer. I really enjoyed reading this book and that’s why I’m giving it a 9/10.

Book review: Portugal, que futuro?

luisabreu — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:32:44 GMT

Generally, I tend to review English written books in this blog. However, and since we’re on the verge of choosing a new PM for the next four years, I’m reviewing this fantastic book here and I’ll do it in Portuguese. In practice, this means that if you don’t understand Portuguese, you can safely skip this post.

O último livro de Medina Carreira (escrito em parceria com Eduardo Dâmaso) é explosivo! Eu comprei-o ontem (19 de Setembro) e consegui terminá-lo hoje (20 de Setembro). A introdução consiste na compilação de vários “ensaios” da autoria do Prof. Medina Carreira e o posfácio é totalmente escrito por Eduardo Dâmaso. Todo o restante livro é escrito em modo de entrevista, onde Medina Carreira responde a várias questões colocadas por Eduardo Dâmaso.

Medina Carreira analisa vários temas “quentes” da actualidade política Portuguesa. No seu tom “corrosivo”, identifica vários problemas que têm vindo a minar Portugal e que levaram à estaganação em que nos encontramos. O livro não fala só de economia, apesar de essa ser uma área essencial que serve de suporte a todos os direitos e “benesses” que temos vindo a ter nos últimos anos.

Por exemplo, no capítulo dedicado à educação (apropriadamente intitulado de ‘Educação: “Magalhães” e mais o quê?’), apresenta uma análise detalhada sobre vários pontos incompreensíveis do nosso sistema educativo. Tal como Medina Carreira, também penso que a introdução de “Magalhães” nas nossas escolas não passa de espectáculo político! Ninguém nega a importância das novas tecnologias, mas eu tenho muitas dúvidas em relação a fornecer computadores a miúdos que ainda não sabem escrever nem contar direito. Existem ainda outras coisas mal explicadas…as tão apregoadas “Novas Oportunidades”…alguém acredita na formação que é dada nestes cursos? E as reformas da educação? Quem é que sai beneficiado com a tal “escola inclusiva”? Serão os alunos? Os Pais? E o estatuto dos alunos? Enfim, tudo áreas que contribuem para o aumento do descrédito do nosso ensino nos últimos anos…

Na minha opinião, capítulo mais importante será, provavelmente, o capítulo V. Nesse capítulo, Medina Carreira desmistifica completamente o mito do “keynesianismo” e explica porque é que esse modelo não tem qualquer interesse nos dias de hoje para um país como Portugal. Depois de ler a resposta à pergunta da página 95, onde apresenta os principais princípios dessa doutrina, torna-se impossível não rir às gargalhadas quando ouvimos o nosso PM a justificar as grandes obras (como por exemplo, o TGV) com a doutrina de Keynes.

Antes de dar a nota final, aproveito para recomendar este livro a todos aqueles que se interessam com o estado da Nação. A minha nota para este excelente livro: 9.5/10.

Book review: JavaScript, the good parts

luisabreu — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:43:41 GMT

I’ve just finished reading Douglas Crockford’s book and I can tell you that is a fantastic book. Notice that the book concentrates on the language itself, so don’t buy this book and expect to find a good reference for learning DHTML. The book is full of small nuggets which will guide you through the most important concepts of the language. Besides doing that, the author also gives you his opinion on which features you should use for writing good JavaScript code (the best part is that he explains why and he also presents a list with the features you shouldn’t use – notice that I’ve been writing on this stuff lately. This books goes even farther and will give you much more details on several topics I’ve mentioned in the JavaScript series posts).

I guess that the best thing I can say about this book is that it should have been out a few years ago when I started writing JavaScript code: it would have saved me lots of time! I’m giving it 9/10 and I’m recommending it to anyone that wants to have a better understanding of JavaScript.

Book review: How would you move Mount Fuji

luisabreu — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:41:36 GMT

This was another of the books I’ve managed to read during my last vacations. It’s an interesting book which presents several puzzles (supposedly) used by Microsoft during their hiring process. Besides presenting the answers to the puzzles, author William Poundstone adds a couple of “extra” chapters which try to “justify” the reasons associated with the use of this kind of puzzles by companies on their hiring process. Overall, I found it quite entertaining (though I must confess that I probably wouldn’t solve half of them under pressure) and I’m giving it 8/10.

Book review: Software Estimation

luisabreu — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:24:03 GMT

During my last vacations, I’ve manager to read a couple of books. One of them was Steve McConnell’s Software Estimation book. The author starts by making an important point regarding estimation: art vs science. It then starts building on several important concepts before presenting several tips and techniques that might lead to more accurate estimations. You’ll also find several interesting facts which explain why so many estimates go awry (the cone of uncertainty concept was really well explained and I think that anyone who reads the book will easily get it).

Even though the book has good content, it’s not really one of those topics that makes me want to read “without stop”. In fact, I did had some problems reading through some chapters (they felt pretty boring) and I guess that’s why I’m only giving it 7.5/10.

Book review: The Nomadic Developer

luisabreu — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:46:10 GMT

This was one of the books I’ve read while I was on vacations. It’s really an interesting book which gives you several valuable advices that you should follow if you intend to work as a consultant. It starts by giving you several clues on how to identify the firms you’re interviewing for so that you don’t end up working in a bad place. To help you know the company you’re interviewing for, there’s a chapter with a list of questions that you should ask. These questions cover different areas and should give you a really good idea about the way that company works.

After that it goes into explaining how consulting firms work so that you can have a good understanding of why things happen the way they do. As I said, there’s lots of advices on what you should and shouldn’t do to thrive as a consultant.

If you know me, you know that I’m not a consultant (at least, not yet! I guess I need to try it in the future to see how I get along :)). However, I did find lots of value in the recommendations that the author has made along the book: I’d say that most of it (if not all) does apply to your work as an employee too (especially the advice on what you should and shouldn’t do at work). Final score: 8/10.

PT LINQ book mentioned on MVP blog

luisabreu — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:32:23 GMT

More info here.

Book review: Here comes everybody

luisabreu — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:08:10 GMT

In my latest mini-vacations, I had some free time to update my reading stack. One of the books I read was Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. After seeing it well referenced in Jeff Atwood’s blog, I’ve bought and saved it for future reading.

In this book, Clay Shirky talks about the new opportunities available for group organization with the introduction of new technologies and social tools. It’s a really well written book (I managed to read it in 2 days while getting a tan by the pool :)) which presents several interesting stories that will keep you hooked until the last page.

Overall, I’m giving it a 9/10 for its content and writing quality.

Book review: The Bourne Identity

luisabreu — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:42:55 GMT

Now that my miny-vacations are over, it’s time to start posting again. For the first post, I decided to update my book reading with a short review of Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity. To be honest, I’ve only bought this book because I loved the Bourne trilogy (which I still consider one of the best action movies out there).

Overall, the book ended up being interesting and really different from the movie. This only means that the cinema guys did an excellent work on adapting the book to film (which, for instance, didn’t happen with the The Vinci’s Code, where the movie is a copy of the book – I guess that someone forgot that things that work for books don’t always work on movies and vice-versa).~

Going back to the book, it’s only fair to mention that Robert Ludlum did an excellent job in creating the Bourne character. The plot is good(though, as I said, really different from the movie) and, sometimes, a little dense (which is great for an espionage book). Robert Ludlum has a very peculiar writing style (and I’ve even go as far as saying that it won’t be appreciated by many people). I liked it, but I’m not sure if it will please everyone :)

Overall, I’m giving it 7.5/10.

Book review: 97 Things Every Software Architect should know

luisabreu — Sat, 16 May 2009 12:59:18 GMT

It was only yesterday that I’ve finished reading this book which consists on several essays written by different software architects on the super interesting topic that is Software Architecture. Overall, it’s an interesting book with lots of good advice. Perhaps even more important is the fact that all of the essays are 2 pages long (and are really easy to read). I guess that this book is for you if you’re after some light reading on software development. I’m giving it 7/10.

Portuguese book on LINQ is out!

luisabreu — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:53:52 GMT

Yes, it is true! After several incidents :), we (me and Paulo) finally made it! Our book on LINQ is out. If you understand Portuguese and you want to know more about LINQ (and you’re really keen on understanding the features added to the languages for supporting it), then I’d say that this book is a good option. Even though the book is completely written in C#, we didn’t forget the VB.NET programmers! You can get the VB.NET complements and code (btw, the downloads contain also all the C# code that was printed on the book) from the book’s company web site.

Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!

Book review: C# 2008 and 2005 Threaded Programming

luisabreu — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:41:16 GMT

This is the second book I have read in multithreading programming (the first was the exceptional Concurrent Programming in Windows, by Joe Duffy). As I've said in the past, this is a topic which really interests me and that's why I gladly accepted a free copy from Packt for review. As you can see from its title, this is (essentially) a beginners book. It's full of code snippets and instructions of where to put that code (where you’re supposed to build demo projects by following the steps detailed in the book). This kind of organization doesn't really appeals to me... I'd really prefer to see everything together than have code mixed with instructions (this is personal, since I do prefer to read a book away from the PC and, in this case, having instructions detailing what I need to do step by step isn't really something I enjoy).

The book has a couple of intro chapters which give you some information about the hardware and introduces you to threads and processes. After that, you quickly jump into code examples. You'll jump right into C# windows forms code and you'll start by using a BackgroundWorker object to add asynchronous behavior to your app. In fact, this was really a surprise to me because I never thought a beginners book would jump right into a Windows Forms apps. I'd really prefer to start from a console app because that would let me concentrate on threading itself instead of wasting lots of lines with UI code (I'm not saying that using the BackgroundWorker isn't important; just questioning if that is really the first practical thing you should put in a beginners threading book). I guess that it's fair to say that this is mostly a Windows Forms multithreading book since most (if not all) of its examples are windows forms examples.

Going back to the content, I did like the parts where the author showed how to use some tools (ex.: Process Explorer) for getting info on what's happening and I did found value in chapter 5, where the author presents some tips for debugging multithreaded code. Adding a chapter on Parallel Extensions was also a good idea, though I think that there definitely was a lot more to say about it (though I guess that the size of the book might have limited the author to the stuff that is presented on that chapter).

Now, here are some of the topics I expected to see mentioned on this book (and weren't or weren't well covered):

Memory model: no, I didn't expect to find many lines on this (since it's an introductory book). But it should have been mentioned because it explains why a lot of things might go wrong in multithreading programming.
Data synchronization: I expected to find info on this topic. It's really important in multithreading scenarios and I guess that it should have at least one chapter on it (I believe that presenting Monitor, Reader/writer locks are far more important than reusing BackgroundWorker across several chapters). I'm not sure why, but I think that there are noo examples of lock usage (which is something that really made me sad). On the other hand, being able to partition your work so that all the parts can run independently is really something which we must all try to achieve (and the author does give a lot of emphasis on that). Just wished that this portioning would be complemented with info on how to synchronize data access since that will be needed in the "real world".
APM: the asynchronous programming model based on delegates and the event-based asynchronous pattern deserved to have a chapter about them.

Bottom line: I that think this book could be improved if it had more info in the previous topics and less stories/printed code+instructions. Btw, I didn't really enjoy the stories on the FBI agents or NASA either...if the idea was to mimic the style of the head first series, then it wasn't really achieved. Having said all this, I guess I can't really give it more than 6/10.

Book review: ThoughtWorks Anthology

luisabreu — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 22:33:18 GMT

I’ve just finished reading a couple of interesting essays on software development which were compiled into this book. If you really enjoy those books helps you reflect in your profession (and you’re a software developer), then this book is for you. Classification: 7.5/10.

Book review: Concurrent Programming on Windows

luisabreu — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:14:19 GMT

I’ve finished reading this excellent book written by Joe Duffy. Yes, it’s a bit big and it mixes theory with practice (which might not be what you want). Due to that, I think that it’s a little bit difficult to define the target audience of this book (they probably tried to make it a pleasant read to everyone and we all know how that tends to end…).

Having said that, I believe that you should buy this book if you’re doing windows development. It provides great coverage of all the stuff you need to know in order to write effective multithreaded code. Even though you should read the book from cover to cover (ok, I know…it’s really a huge book!), you can also use it as a reference book.

Before giving my classification, I think that there are some gotchas with this book. For instance, I looked several times at the cover to check if this was really an Addison&Wesley book. I’m sorry, but A&W made me used to getting absolutely correct texts and that doesn’t happen in this book. There were several sentences that I had to read several times because they simply didn’t make sense (and it seems like I wasn’t the only one to complain about this problem). Despite those problems, I’m still giving it a final note of 9/10.

Book review: Our Iceberg is Melting

luisabreu — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 21:41:47 GMT

I’ve just finished reading this John Kotter’s books. It’s really short (I’ve read it during this afternoon) and it really presents most of the problems you’ll find whenever you try to introduce any sort of change into an organization. The penguin fable is really cool and I bet you’ll identify all of the “penguins” of your organization instantly :)

Anyway, I must confess that reading this book was the only good thing that came of the new evaluation system (also known as SIADAP) since it was recommended by the person that was presenting it as a good read for justifying the needed change. Interestingly (or not), the message I got from the book confirms my initial suspicion: this evaluation system is completely wrong and should be banned (If you don’t work in Portugal, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll really come back to this subject to explain what is it and why it’s completely wrong).

Anyway, back to the book, I’m giving it 8/10.

Book review: Software Language Engineering

luisabreu — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:19:05 GMT

In the last few days, I’ve been trying to understand more about metamodeling. I’m still not sure that this will take off, but I’m still curious about it. So, I’ve decided to buy and read Anneke Klepe’s Software Language Engineering book. It was a good buy and I was able to grasp some interesting concepts that you’ll generally need to take care when you’re doing metamodeling. It’s not a practical book. It’s really one of those books that focus on presenting concepts. Yes, you’ll see some examples but this is not Microsoft DSL or EMF book…that might be good…or it might be a problem if you’re looking for something platform specific.

Bottom line: if you’re searching for a book that presents metamodeling concepts gradually and provides info on several aspects on a non-platform specific way, then this book is for you. My classification: 7.5/10.

Book review: Tribes

luisabreu — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:56:23 GMT

I’ve just finished reading Godin’s Tribes book. It’s really an interesting, motivational reading which will surely inspire you in leading others and creating “tribes”. Even though you’re free to disagree with his ideas (I didn’t bought them all), it’s undeniable that Seth pin points the main reason why we don’t do what we probably should: fear. Fear of being joked, fear of loosing the job, etc, etc.

It’s really a short book, which, as you might know by now, is really good because as time passes by I’m getting less and less time for leisure (I need to do something about this because it’s really starting to be a problem). Anyway, I did enjoy it and recommend it. I’m giving it 8/10.