Tag archives for books

  1. How to become a programmer

    By 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.

  2. Blogging as it used to be

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    When she brought the tray and put it on the bed table I thanked her and ate a little of the supper. Afterward it was dark outside and I could see the beams of the search-lights moving in the sky. I watched for a while and then went to sleep. I slept heavily except once I woke sweating and scared and then went back to sleep trying to stay outside of my dream. I woke for good long before it was light and heard roosters crowing and stayed on awake until it began to light. I was tired and once it was really light I went back to sleep again.

    Can you guess the author?  Here is hint : these lines were written in 1929.  Yes, you got it right.  It’s Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms“, last paragraph of Chapter 13.

    While reading the book, I caught myself a few times thinking that it feels a lot like a blog – first person story telling, simple sentences, a few “what I ate for breakfast” paragraphs.  But then again, somehow it feels better than a blog – connectivity, metaphors, a tiny hint of old times.

    They say that one can improve his own writing by reading great writers.  Having this book in mind, I do agree with that.  And, it seems, I’m not the only one thinking of what and how to learn from Hemingway for my blogging – Copyblogger published Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well some time ago.

  3. WordPress for Dummies

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    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”.

  4. The World Is Flat

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    The World Is FlatI 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.

  5. The World Is Flat

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    This video is off a smart guy talking to MIT crowd about globalization. The speech is titled after the book he wrote – “The World Is Flat“. This is the most interesting speech on the subject of globalization that I’ve ever heard. It’s very widely scoped too – it touches on everything from Berlin wall and Netscape browser to 9/11 and open source. I’ll be ordering the book shortly too.

    The speech is in Real Media format and is about one hour long, so you might want to install Real Player and find a large piece of time, if you plan on watching it.

    After I saw it, I was somewhat tired. The speech is very thought provoking and it made my brains work hard. Packing it all into my head felt like dealing with a wardrobe of clothes and a tiny bag. Things were falling out of it all the time and I couldn’t manage the zipper to close.

    Rarely I feel like this.

  7. Working with named pipes in Perl

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    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.

    Continue reading “Working with named pipes in Perl” »

  8. Quote of the day

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

    © Douglas Adams

  9. Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    I found this list of most harmful books of the last two centuries via Alex Exler’s LiveJournal. Of course, the harmness of the each book is very subjective and depends on who are the judges. Also, interesting to note, that although books are considered harmful, each entry has a link to appropriate Amazon.com page.

    I myself flipped through a couple of books in this list while I was a teenager. Now I am more interested in reading them, but I don’t have any copies around.

  10. One place I shouldn’t go

    By Leonid Mamchenkov

    I have a special relationship with all bookstores. Since I feel an unstopable urge to buy half of the books every time I go in to one, I try to avoid them as much as possible. Actually, I’ve been pretty successful at that. I decided to buy all my books from Amazon, but since I am too greedy to pay for shipping and since I don’t have a credit card of my own, I don’t buy that often. All my book shopping ends with my wishlist.

    Today though I made a strategic mistake. I had to visit my bank and instead of driving, I walked. And I totally forgot (or didn’t want to remember) that there is an excellent Kyriakou bookshop on the way. I passed it once on the way to the bank and pushed myself not to enter. It took all my powers, but I passed by. Since I didn’t have any powers left, I couldn’t take another road home. And on the way back, I went in. Ouch.

    I spent less than 3 minutes inside, but I managed to buy 3 books, paying over 50 CYP (Now you can understand why I try to avoid these places). Here’s what I got:

    • “Digital Photography Special Effects” by Michael Freeman. It’s been some time since I wanted to buy some book that would explain few tricks of digital image manipulation. When I saw the book by Michael Freeman I just had to buy it. I’ve read his other book “Complete Guide to Photography“, which is still the best book on the subject that I’ve read. The Special Effects book is in hardcover, with lots of illustrations, and costs about 19 CYP. “That’s value for money” I thought and picked it up.
    • “Mediterranean Island Dreams” by Jeremy Horner. This is another book that I picked from the Photography section. It has almost 250 color pictures of Mediterranean islands and I want it for some inspiration and ideas. Plus 21 CYP is not that much for that many pictures. Picked that up too.
    • “Rough guide to Cyprus” by Mark Dubin. This book is very well tested, since my good friend Vladimir has a copy. We used the book to investigate Cyprus and to open way more places here than we could imagine – restaurants and beaches specifically. I wanted to order this book from Amazon anyway, but when I saw it in the local bookshop for a mere 12 CYP I decided to buy it.

    Additionally, I’ve discovered that this bookshop has an excellent Photography section with lots and lots of books. I’ll have to revisit it next month for sure. How can I stop this fever now?