November 20, 2007 at 12:30PM New books!
I ordered ‘Release It!’ and ‘Programming Erlang’ from Amazon on Thursday and they arrive today. Now, I’m quite aware that Amazon has a warehouse in Cork, but I’m still surprised at how quickly the books arrived.
I’m finishing up reading ‘Beautiful Code’. Overall, it’s a great book, but the individual chapters are something of a mixed bag qualitywise.
The worst chapters, in my opinion, are chapters 20 (”A Highly Reliable Enterprise System for NASA’s Mars Rover Mission”) and 27 (”Integrating Business Partners the RESTful Way”). The former was weighed down with buzzwords and enterprisey crap and the system it described neither impressed me nor evoked any sense of beauty within me. The latter was just plain disappointing and the author seemed to misunderstand what RESTful use of HTTP is really about, though it was a weakish chapter as a whole, it’s real problem was that it was mistitled. Had it been called “Integrating Business Partners with POX over HTTP” or something similar, I don’t think I’d’ve minded as much.
On the plus side, you’ve chapters like “Top Down Operator Precedence” (Chapter 7), “A Regular Expression Matcher” (Chapter 1), and “Beautiful Concurrency” (Chapter 24), which were all quite stunning. In the case of that last chapter, though I’m one of these people who thinks that shared nothing is usually a better approach to distributed computing, I still see the value and potential usefulness of software transactional memory, and, as a bonus, it demonstrated the value of lazy evaluation and a well-designed type system, especially when combined with type inference.
I haven’t read from chapter 29 (”Treating Code as an Essay”) onwards yet, but I expect to get through them tonight.
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