Skip to main content

Recent books I have read this month

I have read a series of excellent books since the start of August so I thought I would share them with you...


White Fever

Recommended by a friend who had read it, this book is an interesting look into the strange world of Siberia. Whilst it wasn't as humourous as I hoped (it actually left me feeling quite blue in general due to the plight of the native siberians) but the book is packed full of weird and wonderful characters. 

The Gods Themselves

I really enjoyed this book. Having noticed I have missed some of Asimovs books I needed to fill in the gaps. This has realyl interesting points to think about in terms of how we kid ourselves about energy because we don't want to change the way we live. The ultimate message for me was you can't just convince people there is a problem. You need to come up with a solution at the same time. 

I enjoyed the moon seperation side story. They remind me of early spacers from Asimovs robot series. They don't particularly like earthlings and see them as dirty...

 

The End Of Eternity

Another Asmiov book. I can't believe I had not read this before. Essentially it's a time travel based boggle. It raises loads of interesting ideas and literally had me hooked so I could not even walk to the train station without reading it. It only lasted 4 days. How can people watch television when there are books like this to read! Amazing!

 

Upcoming..

I have changed direction slightly with my next set of books to read. At night I am reading 2001 A Space Odyssey by Arther C Clarke (I'll let you know what I think when I have finished it). In the day (whilst commuting etc.. ) I am reading Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories by Akutagawa. I have actually read this before but I can no longer remember it and something got me thinking about Akutagawa again. One thing I have done this time whilst reading it is read the foreward by the translator. They have shed some light on other Japanese authors that I probably need to take a look at also. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Creating star ratings in HTML and Javascript

I'd searched around a little for some shortcuts to help in doing this but I couldn't find anything satisfactory that included the ability to pull the rating off again for saving. I'd ended up coming up with this rather cheeky solution. Hopefully it helps you too! This is my first post in a while (I stopped blogging properly about 8 years ago!) It's strange coming back to it. Blogger feels very crusty and old by todays standards too.

Make your objects immutable by default

More about the Good Dojo In my post last week , I discussed creating objects that are instantiated safely. Please go back and read if you are interested. At the end of the post, I mentioned that I'd also written the class so it was immutable when instantiated. This is important!!! I feel like a broken record in repeating this but I am sure at the time of writing your code, you aren't modifying your object all over the place and so are safe in the belief that protecting against mutability is overkill. Please remember though, your code could be around for a hell of a long time. You aren't writing your code for now... you are writing for the next fool that comes along (including you) . Nothing is more upsetting that coming back to fix a bug on some wonderfully crafted code to say "Who has butchered my code?!", but often you were involved at the start of the process. You made the code easy to modify, allowing objects to be used / reused / modified without thi

An instantiated object should be "ok"

I've been QA'ing quite a bit of work recently and one common theme I've noticed across both Java and C# projects I have been looking at is that we occasionally open ourselves up unessacarily to Exceptions by the way objects are being created. My general rule of thumb (which I have seen mentioned in a Pluralsight video recently but also always re-iterate in various Robust Software talks I have done) is that you shouldn't be able to create an object and then call a method or access a property that then throws an exception. At worst, it should return null (I'm not going to moan about that now). I've created an example below. We have two Dojos, one is good and one is bad. The bad dojo looks very familiar though. It's a little class written in the style that seems often encouraged. In fact, many classes start life as something like this. Then as years go on, you and other colleagues add more features to the class and it's instantiation becomes a second