Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk
2/5
A barely reheated Glamorama (celebrities and brands in bold face) about star-fucking in the form of a movie script. Enough Palahniukisms to make it worth finishing (for me), but only because it was mercifully short.
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Tags: chuck palahniuk, grandmother, passengers, olympics, millions, graduation, whales, commercial, artificial, pantses, hundred, torchwood, communicate, director
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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston
4/5
Over 30 interviews with tech company founders ranging from Ray Ozzie and Mitch Kapor to James Hong of "Hot or Not". The interview with Philip Greenspun of ArsDigital is very raw and very amusing. Joel Spolsky's advice is "So quit your day job. Have one other founder, at least. I'd sat that's the minimum bar to getting anywhere." - well, that plus have a hit blog read by developers and then sell tools for developers. Diverse, inconclusive but fascinating.
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Tags: jessica livingston, stieg larsson, small, hangover, mammograms, scientists, cordoba, toddlers, calif, announced, updating, neanderthal, science
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The Spire by Richard North Patterson
3/5
A good enough holiday read and nice to see Patterson return to a straight psychological thriller rather than the last few OpEds loosely wrapped with some plot.
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Tags: richard north patterson, mario hewardt, microsoft, political, criticises, early, rights, google, cameras, outsource, raised, selection, lacking, reading, internet, really
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Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
3/5
Classic Hornby. It's fairly close to High Fidelity with it's themes of love and music obsession-ism and so feels slightly too comfortable but certainly worth a read if you're a fan. 3/24/2010 2:00:00 AM
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1) by Stieg Larsson
3/5
Slow, but highly atmospheric mystery. The first half of the book is dedicated to setting the scene and then the pieces start to fit into place like a glacier melting. The pace makes the occasional punctuation of extreme sexual violence all the more shocking. Fun enough, so I'll probably read the rest of the trilogy and try to catch the film (which has to be a profoundly truncated version).3/22/2010 2:00:00 AM
Practical WPF Charts and Graphics by Jack Xu
4/5
Be aware that this book is 90% code, 5% mathematics and 5% explanation. This isn't a criticism, Dr. Xu builds up a complete charting library that includes 2D, WPF 3D and manual 3D methods. The mathematics covers the theory and practice of 2D and 3D transforms as well as techniques for smoothing, interpolating and trending data. It's a fast read to get a sense of the content and then a great reference work to dip back into as needed. 3/14/2010 3:00:00 AM
C# Design and Development: Expert One on One by John Paul Mueller
1/5
This book is just atrocious. Each section sells itself as providing all the information you need about a certain topic, then provides trivial and often incorrect or at least highly subjective details. A couple of examples:
The chapter on error handling makes the point that you should catch the most specific Exception possible, but then goes on to demonstrate catching a FormatException, a DivideByZero exception and then just System.Exception. The whole point is to avoid catching Exceptions that you can't handle. There's a legitimate debate here between trying to plaster up the cracks with general catches and letting the application die with a useful stack, however this book doesn't discuss it. There's also very brief coverage of creating your own derived Exception but it doesn't touch on serialization.
Serializing an XML file is somehow included in the section on "Special Coding Methodologies", and labors over calling both .Flush() and .Close() on a StreamWriter. Despite the fact that you only need to call Close(), and that StreamWriter is IDisposable and so a using statement is really the way forward for this example.
I could go on, but won't. Avoid. 3/8/2010 2:00:00 AM
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- Casttoo from jwz (I want to break my arm again...).
Tags: nick hornby, stieg larsson, jack xu, john paul mueller, dorothy, popularity, winslet, constitutional, casttoo, murdered, petition, football, emerging
Categories: Book Reviews | Links | C#
Programming WPF by Chris Sells
4/5
A highly detailed and well written reference to WPF. Note that this second edition is still based on Visual Studio 2005 / .NET 3.0 so a little out of date now. I still found the book to be very useful and would recommend it both for picking up WPF basics and to refer back to for more advanced topics when needed.2/26/2010 2:00:00 AM
Professional C# 2008 by Christian Nagel
4/5
I'm in the process of upgrading to VS2008 and loved the 2005 version of this book so picked up the 2008 update. It's a broad language and framework reference, perfect for understanding what's available in .NET 3.5 and how to get started. My only complaint is that it could have used a "what's new" section or guide to separate out completely new technologies from those familiar from .NET 2.0. Not a big problem though, it's easy to skim through the old stuff and then pay attention when you reach something new. I'll probably pick up the 2010 version in 2015 or so ;)2/15/2010 2:00:00 AM
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