Review: The Code Book – the most entertaining book on cryptography you’ll ever read

I recently wandered into a thrift store and as is usual in these stores I headed to the book section.(I live by the maxim that you can never own too many books.) The only thing that really caught my eye was a hardcover edition of The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt [...]

Popularity: 5% [?]

C# 4.0 How-To now available for pre-sale!

For the last year, aside from starting a great job with Bing, I’ve also been working on a book about C# 4.0 and the upcoming .Net framework. The news: it is finally available for presale! This book is not your typical C# reference. It’s designed to be an easy guide to how to accomplish [...]

Popularity: 5% [?]

Software Creativity and Strange Loops

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of technology and scientific understanding that would need to go into a computer like the one on the Enterprise in Star Trek, and specifically its interaction with people. It’s a computer that can respond to questions in context—that is, you don’t have to restart in every [...]

Popularity: 11% [?]

Review: Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, 2nd Ed.

I saw this book when I bought Programming WPF a few weeks ago and it looked promising enough to buy. I’ve been doing unit testing in C# for a few years now, but I thought there were always things to learn and maybe I’d pick up a few new ideas.
It is easy to contrast this [...]

Popularity: 7% [?]

5 Books to make you stupider

Well, after a week of investigation, I’ve settled on a social network for books: Shelfari. It’s attractive, easy-to-use, easy to manipulate many books at once, they have a mobile version, and I have one friend on it (who invited me).
 Goodreads.com also looked nice, and it almost won. bookwormr.com, the one I originally found was just [...]

Popularity: 7% [?]

Online reading list – bookwormr

I found a great site I wanted to share with everybody: bookwormr.
To explain:
I’ve got 3 large books on my nightstand at the moment:

Scotland: The Story of a Nation – Magnus Magnusson – Much of my heritage is Scottish, and I got intensely interested in Scottish history during our trip to Edinburgh last year.
Code Complete – [...]

Popularity: 7% [?]

20 Things to do when the Internet goes down

Even if the Internet connection goes out, your computer does not become a dumb brick. There were days these last few days where I didn’t bother turning it on. Then I realized all the things I could still do.
(My home Internet connection finally came back this morning. I’m bit upset that they didn’t figure it [...]

Popularity: 7% [?]

The Effective Software Developer’s Book List

What books should all serious developers read and study? This is a list of books that I have either found particularly helpful in my own growth as a programmer, or that are popular on various required-reading lists. I have bolded books I consider absolute required reading (probably multiple times) for all software developers.
I’ve gathered these [...]

Popularity: 23% [?]

Farewell, Robert Jordan

According to his blog, Robert Jordan passed away yesterday. He fought a tough illness for quite a while. I became a big fan of The Wheel of Time a few years ago and forced myself to stop reading the books until the final one comes out.
I loved the books because they were immense, detailed, [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Fahrenheit 451

I just read the book Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. This is the first time I’ve read it, never having come across it in school, like most people seem to. To me, it was the greatest argument against getting a TV. My wife and I decided towards the beginning of our marriage to never subscribe to [...]

Popularity: 5% [?]