Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

In the last couple of days I repeated this more than four times, so let me post it here for any future references.

Two points for those who want to become a programmer.  First, there is no lack of information these days. There are numerous tutorials online and books in print.  There are magazines, classes, mailing lists, search engines, and everything and anything you need.  But all that information won’t make you into a programmer.  In order to become one, you have to program.  There is no way around it.  You have to design your programs, write the code, debug it, test it, document it, and maintain it.  And you should also read good code that other people wrote.  There is no lack of open source projects these days - take the most popular ones and you’ll learn a lot.

Secondly, among all those available resources, I can suggest two books and two books only.  If you read and study both of them, you won’t need to read another book about programming your life time.  The first book is “The C programming language” by Kernighan and Ritchie.  This is an all time classic.  The second book is “Programming Perl” by Larry Wall.  This is a piece of modern literature.

Matt links to the announcement about “WordPress for Dummies” book coming out.  It’s been a while since I read any “for Dummies” books myself - they are usually written for beginners, a stage which I don’t stay at for long enough to buy and read a book.  But I feel like “WordPress for Dummies” book could use some publicity.  There are a lot of people without technical background using WordPress and trying to figure things out.  I think that a book like that could save them a lot of time and effort, as well as show a few things they might not have thought about.

It’s not the only book about WordPress out there, but it’s not in the crowd by any means.  Here are the Amazon search results for “wordpress”.

I have just finished reading the book by Thomas Friedman “The World Is Flat“.

As you’ve probably noticed I am not a big book freak. I rarely read anything outside of very technical literature. But I felt that I absolutely had to read this one.

I ordered immediately after I saw this video, which is Thomas Friedman’s speech in MIT, in which he talks about the globalization and the flat world. Basically, what he did in MIT, was a very quick and brief overviwe of the first three chapters of the book. His speech was amazing. He was talking in very simple language about really complex things. He made a lot of stuff so much easier to understand. And he made some really interesting connections.

I have to say though, that many of the things he was talking about weren’t new to me. I was thinking about them myself. I just couldn’t possibly form them into any shape or express them in any understandable form.

Friedman did very clearly. And he introduced a lot of examples. And he added a lot of credebility to what he was saying by interviewing a whole lot of smart people.

While the book is written in a very simple language and with a lot of examples, it was difficult to read for me. It was so thought-provoking that I had to stop about every two or three pages for an hour or a day to re-think everything I read. It took me alsmot two month to read 470 pages. And I am sure I’ve missed a lot too. I’ll have to re-read it in the near future.

This is the most complete and wide view of globalization that I have come across. Ever. The book doesn’t just talk and talk about some abstract forms. It shows the very specific connections between events that happened throughout the human history, with more focus on the last 30 or so years. All events and connections are looked at from a multitude of angles - political, economical, cultural, technological. Each of those angles is futher down broken into a multitude of options. Examples from American, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African, and European cultures are given. Interviews were conducted with a whole lot of people from ex-presidents and current ministers to CEOs of international corporations to religious leaders, as well as plenty of common people from a multitude of backgrounds.

Globalization aside, this book is the best piece of journalism that I’ve read in a long long while. A job well done. Truly a bestseller. I would seriously recommend this book to anyone. Yes, to anyone. Not only people who are interested in globalization, but to all people who are interested in their own present and future. There are lots of questions, and there are lots of answers. You’ll surely understand the world better after reading this book.

I do.

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user tvset on 2005-12-03

• ebooks — A whole bunch of free ebooks
  Tagged as: books ebook library reading resource

The collegue of mine came across a problem that developed into an interesting solution that I decided to share with the world. Actually, I think the world is pretty much aware of the solution, but just in case that I will ever be looking for this solution again, I’ll have it handy here.

The task at hand was to do some processing of the logs on the fly. The syslog was configured to filter the appropriate logs into a named pipe and a Perl script was written to read from the said pipe and do all the processing.

The original piece of code looked something like this:

open (SYSLOG, "<$named_pipe")
  or die "Couldn't open $named_pipe: $!\n";

while () {
  do_processing($_);
}

close(SYSLOG);

The problem came with syslog daemon restarts. Every time the syslog was stopped, the EOF was sent to the pipe and the script stopped reading it.

[Read more →]