Books

How Do I Write Good Code?

Eric Dietrich, over at DaedTech, explains how he writes good code. It’s a post worth a read in full, but here is a summary:

Make it easy to change
Make it really readable
Make it work
Make it elegant
Learn from accomplished practitioners

He is also listing a few books to learn from (the Amazon links are those of Eric – I have no idea if they are affiliated or not, but if they are, he’ll get the credit, like he deserves):

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Test Driven Development: By Example
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Constructio

O’Reilly Parody Book Generator

I have utmost respect for O’Reilly Media. They’ve published numerous technology books, aggregate and shared plenty of human knowledge, and saved years in productivity and tonnes in pulled out hair.

But no matter how many books they will publish, there’s always the need for more. Well, know that need is at least partially solved. Not in the form of whole books, but at least in book covers. With the help of the this parody book generator you too can become an author of whatever was that you wanted to share with the world.

Computer Science from the Bottom Up

Computer Science from the Bottom Up — A free, online book designed to teach computer science from the bottom end up. Topics covered include binary and binary logic, operating systems internals, toolchain fundamentals and system library fundamentals.

Free Data Science Books

I came across a collection of free data science books:

Pulled from the web, here is a great collection of eBooks (most of which have a physical version that you can purchase on Amazon) written on the topics of Data Science, Business Analytics, Data Mining, Big Data, Machine Learning, Algorithms, Data Science Tools, and Programming Languages for Data Science.

Most notably, there are introductory books, handbooks, Hadoop guide, SQL books, social media data mining stuff, and d3 tips and tricks. There’s also plenty on artificial intelligence and machine learning, but that’s too far out for me.

The Secrets of the FBI by Ronald Kessler

“The Secrets of the FBI” is the second audio book by Ronald Kessler that I’ve listened to. I enjoyed it much more than “In the President’s Secret Service“. This one covers the history of the FBI in much more detail, and provides both insider’s perspective and a bird’s eye view of how the FBI was created, evolved and got the where it is now.

One thing that I found very interesting was how much an impact each of the directors had on the development of the FBI, and how different these were. Also, descriptions of technology evolution in the FBI were particularly interesting to me. The state of the computeres by the 9/11 was especially depressing. I nearly couldn’t believe what I was hearing…

Overall, I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in law enforcement history, government projects, and special tactical units.