Rating: 7.3/10. A novel by one of the most famous contemporary Italian writers, Italo Calvino. It is about a boy, Cosmino, who, when he is twelve years old, refuses to eat snails at dinner and climbs a tree, vowing never to come down again. Despite his family’s assumption that he will descend in a few…
Category: Type
SQL Antipatterns by Bill Karwin
Rating: 7.5/10. SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming by Bill Karwin Book about different ways to misuse database schemas, intended for intermediate-level programmers, discusses various common patterns that junior programmers often employ when designing database schemas. I found the anti-patterns to be good, but the proposed solutions are often lacking; they tend to…
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
Rating: 7.4/10. Novel of Norwegian literature, won the Nobel Prize in 1920; it tells the story of a homesteader named Isak in Northern Norway around 1850. The narrative begins with Isak settling in an untouched wilderness, far from any other settlement, where he starts building a home from scratch. Shortly after, his wife, Inger, arrives…
China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty by Mark Edward Lewis
Rating: 7.5/10. An academic history book about everything you wanted to know about the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), considered one of the Chinese Golden Ages, is organized by topic and written in a fairly academic tone. It may be a bit long-winded for a casual audience, as it makes an effort to be detailed rather…
Deep Learning for Vision Systems by Mohamed Elgendy
Rating: 8.0/10. An introductory textbook on computer vision using deep learning, assuming no prior knowledge of deep learning; thus, the first half of the book covers the basic concepts of neural network architecture and training setups. The second half is more advanced, focusing specifically on computer vision, and covers topics such as vision CNN architectures,…
Pyomo – Optimization Modeling in Python by Bynum and others
Rating: 8.2/10. Book giving an overview of the Pyomo optimization framework, which doesn’t solve optimization problems itself but allows users to formulate them in a high-level, object-oriented format. Pyomo acts as an interface with solvers like CPLEX. The book talks about into numerous features of Pyomo but mostly stays clear of the solver algorithms’ internals,…
High-Performance Web Apps with FastAPI by Malhar Lathkar
Rating: 7.6/10. Book that explores the main features of the FastAPI web framework; it’s not super in-depth but covers the main use cases and components in fair detail. Chapter 1. FastAPI offers a number of improvements over other Python frameworks. First, it has type hints that allow the IDE to detect type errors. Next is…
Independent People by Halldor Laxness
Rating: 7.8/10. Work of Icelandic literature that won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, the novel focuses on a farmer named Bjartur and his quest for “independence,” which he defines as being free from debts and obligations to anyone else. The novel describes Bjartur’s life as a sheep farmer in the harsh Icelandic landscape,…
High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik
Rating: 8.5/10. Book covering all aspects of networking and is useful for both front-end and back-end developers; it’s written at a level that doesn’t assume much prior networking knowledge, providing a higher-level overview of various protocols like TCP, HTTP, and WebSocket. It offers practical advice on what these protocol details imply for applications and how…
The Unicode Cookbook for Linguists by Steven Moran and Michael Cysouw
Rating: 7.5/10. Fairly short book that introduces readers to the Unicode standard and the pitfalls of encoding. It’s suitable for both programmers and linguists. It’s probably one of the shorter books on the topic that I’ve come across. However, it seems to focus more on topics of interest to linguists, and several important issues related…
Visual Studio Code for Python Programmers by April Speight
Rating: 7.0/10. Book about the VS Code IDE, catered to Python programmers. It mostly covers basic operations with detailed step-by-step instructions and screenshots. However, I found the depth somewhat lacking. Most of the functions seem like things any seasoned IDE user would know. The book doesn’t go deeply into any particular feature, like launch configurations…
Introduction to Computer and Network Security by Richard R. Brooks
Rating: 8.0/10. Chapter 1: The History of Cryptography. Attempts to encode messages date back to ancient times. However, up until WW1, many of these encoding methods weren’t very effective. Codes were frequently cracked, and various issues often rendered messages unreadable due to coordination problems between the sender and receiver. WW2 marked a significant shift; with…