Rating: 7.9/10. A classic book-length survey about vocabulary testing: the research literature, design considerations, and its usage in education. Many linguistic questions lie at the core of vocabulary testing and don’t have clear-cut answers, like what counts as a word family? (eg: socialize and socializing should probably as a single word, but socialism is quite…
Category: Textbooks
Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition by VanPatten, Smith, Benati
Rating: 8.1/10. Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction by Bill VanPatten, Megan Smith, and Alessandro G. Benati Linguistics textbook about second language acquisition, covering key questions such as: Does L2 acquisition use the same processes as L1? Is input or output more important? Can L2 learners become nativelike or is there a critical…
Introducing Second Language Acquisition by Saville-Troike and Barto
Rating: 7.0/10. This is an introductory textbook on second language acquisition, approaching the subject from the perspective of linguistics, psychology, and sociology. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this book and dropped it after about halfway through. It tries to cover a lot in only 200 pages, but the writing is disorganized, giving only a brief treatment…
A Short Course in Digital Photography by London and Stone
Rating: 8.3/10. A good overview of the art and science of photography, suitable for a beginner. Each page is fully colored and has an abundance of photos to serve as exemplars of what good photography looks like. Section 1 talks about basic camera controls including aperture and shutter speed. Both control exposure, but additionally, shutter…
Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager by James Stanier
Rating: 8.4/10. Book for new and aspiring software engineering managers about how to do the job effectively. Unlike an individual contributor, your output as a manager is basically the output of your team (plus others that you influence), so the job is less about your individual output, and mostly about getting others to achieve their…
An Introduction to Political Philosophy by Jonathan Wolff
Rating: 8.1/10. Political philosophy asks questions about the purpose of government and how power should be distributed in a society. To better understand the role of a state, the first chapter considers what would happen in a “state of nature” where there is no government. Hobbes thought without laws, everyone would be at war constantly….
Machine Learning Design Patterns by Lakshmanan, Robinson, and Munn
Rating: 7.9/10. Book about design patterns specific to machine learning training and productionization. Design patterns are useful since they’re tried-and-tested solutions to reoccurring problems. Even though I’ve used ML in my work for several years, some of these patterns are still new to me. The book is aimed at ML practitioners in the industry and…
Metaethics: An Introduction by Andrew Fisher
Rating: 7.6/10. Summary Metaethics is a second-order philosophy: whereas normative ethics is the study of principles of what’s right and what’s wrong, metaethics studies what we’re doing when we talk about ethics. Are moral facts real, expressing a belief, or expressing an emotion? How do we know if a moral fact is true? The book…
Digital Marketing Strategy by Simon Kingsnorth
Rating: 6.6/10. Book about various topics related to digital marketing, which is marketing any kind of business using digital resources, like ads, email, social media, etc. Topics include how to do SEO, content marketing, social media, personalization, customer retention, company branding, and an assortment of other things. This book is not very well-written, even though…
Six Myths About the Good Life by Joel J. Kupperman
Rating: 7.9/10. Summary Fairly short book by a philosophy professor asking “what makes a life good?” This is a fundamental question for ethics because any ethical theory must assume some kind of utility function (what is good for an individual) before it can consider what’s best for society as a whole. This book examines a…
Introduction to Semantics by Zimmermann and Sternefeld
Rating: 8.5/10. This is an introductory textbook on compositional semantics, which uses higher order logic to represent meaning of words when combined together. This is different from lexical semantics, which is concerned with the meaning of individual words. Below are my notes. Ch1: Lexical Meaning Semantics deals with literal meaning, which excludes hidden / metaphorical…
Exploring the German Language by Sally Johnson and Natalie Braber
Rating: 6.4/10. Not quite what I was expecting — I was looking for a linguistic overview of the German language, but this book is more like an intro linguistics textbook that uses examples from German. About 70% of the material is general linguistics knowledge (eg: explaining what’s a phoneme or morpheme or word class), only…