rubyyot

Sweet! This was the easiest goal ever. No sitting around trying to think of things to add to the list. In fact I already had something in mind when I made the goal.

Each time I tried to tackle a new and more complex issue. Now I’m giving Monorail a try.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked this up. I was interested in reading something by Ayn Rand and this is what was available at the library. Now that I’ve read it, it’s one of my favorite books. Howard Roark is an amazing character, as are the remaining two of the big three in this book. Recommended to any and all.

Good book, but not great. Excessive repetition and strong focus on CORBA.

This was a great read, as I would expect from the pragmatic programmers. I have now wired up a few tests with NUnit, and am evangelizing, or trying to. I hope to be coding again soon in .NET (must be a good book, right) to use some more of what I’ve learned.

I started using subversion this last month and lo and behold there is a goal for it!

I downloaded the 1st edition to this book forever ago in pdf format. It’s just sat around until I recently got interested in rails again. I recently read this book on my Nokia n800. Great book, great read!

I hate when I buy a book on a programming language and I slog through the whole thing just to find that all I learned from 500+ pages was some syntax. This book is not that way. It assumes that you already know programming and teaches you the details of C# and the CLR.

Went back to the movie site today and now it says, coming soon to dvd. Would have liked to have seen this on the big screen.

A wonderful auto-biographical story of an american college student taking a two year trip to find himself training with the buddhist monks of Shaolin. Highly recommended!

Looking back over this list, I’ve read a number of good books this year, I never expected to reach 50, but if I can beat last year’s count (about 20), I will be happy. One book I was eagerly awaiting this year, a book that I knew would be on this list is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I’ve been anticipating this book since I got into the first HP book years ago. Well, it didn’t let me down. Previously, the Goblet of Fire was my favorite in the series, well no longer. Deathly Hallows is an excellent conclusion to a fantastic series.

Started this yesterday. Using Krecipies with a link to a MySQL database with my web provider. Some how using client/server archetecture makes this seem less futile.

Ok, so I’m a fan of the Pragmatic Programmer Bookshelf, this book was very good in any case. It is part of the growing Facets of Ruby Series and sits somewhere between a tutorial and a cookbook. The author takes a lightweight scripting approach to the code in the book, but it would help anyone who uses, or would like to use Ruby. That is unless you are a Ruby Metaprograming guru who can write 3 lines of code that will detect your video card and emulate its driver.

This is the second time that I’ve read this book through cover to cover. Though I admit that I didn’t do the exercises. The last time I read this was almost 10 years ago and it is still the best text I’ve read on developing your programming skills. About the only way I’d improve upon this in a follow up edition would be to supplement the example code with Ruby code, and perhaps discuss in more depth some alternate methodologies such as XP and Agile.

If you are a programmer and haven’t read this book, or are considering reading Code Complete, I would highly recommend this to you.

Great book, looking forward to the next two in this trilogy.

This is not a bad book, but Clive has done so much with his past works that it’s seemed worse than it was. This book has no beginning and no end. It’s beginning is The Great and Secret Show and its ending really wasn’t there. Is there a 3rd book of the Art?

I’ve finished my 10th book this year!! This one was the widely popular Eragon. It was a good book, but I didn’t feel that it lived up to the hype. A good effort for a 15 y/o boy, but some of the dialog was really corny and over all it felt insubstantial.

Just finished this and despite the poor reviews, I enjoyed it. While I enjoyed the character development and secrets unearthed the book lacked an overarching plot. No driving force, no conclusion. If you are into the series, it is a must. If you haven’t read the previous books, or didn’t like them then pass this one by.

A pioneer in fantasy, I had high hopes for this book. Mr. Moorcock had some good ideas and some bad ideas for this book, but unfortunately never wrote much more than an outline of any of them. Elric, could have been an awesome character, but fell flat as he became a mouthpiece for the author’s droll “as we both know” descrptions of the fantastical world that was the setting of this book. So fantastic in fact that many things were not believable. A massive throne carved from a single ruby? Come on, that’s just dumb.
This book ended up being part Sinbad movie and part D&D campaign. Unfortunately, it held little worthy of being called a novel. In the end, I was fortunate that it was as short as it was.

It seems that everyone has a different interpretation of this book’s meaning. It’s that kind of book, presenting riddles that are mirrored, so that you see in them something personal. Perhaps not riddles, but complete darkness, burning away all but introspection. I don’t know. In any case, I think the answers to the questions that this book raises must come from within, and not from the house itself.
Some people, my wife included, felt that this was one of the scariest books that she ever read. Now that I have read it, I would say that it was not horror at all. It is a book about coping, abuse, loss, grief, madness, death and nothing. I am interested to find out what others have made of this remarkable story.