Get the Harry Harrison Megapack

The Harry Harrison Megapack: 12 Classics of Science Fiction, including ROBOT JUSTICE, DEATHWORLD, and DEATHWORLD II

By Harry Harrison

Harry Harrison was one of the greatest science fiction writers you've probably never heard of. He wrote a whole bunch of fantastic stories including the Stainless Steel Rat series and my favourite, "The Technicolor Time Machine" (go find it - you'll thank me later). He was particularly good at the science fiction short story. 

If you fancy finding out more about his work there's a really good value pack of his stories available on Amazon. For less than a pound you get a whole bunch of content including two of his Deathworld stories. 

Well worth seeking out.

The Thrilling Adventures of Babbage and Lovelace is a Winner

One of my favourite books ever has won a prize. I blogged about it a while back and now it (or more properly the author, Sydney Padua) has won the British Society for the History of Mathematics 2015 Neuman Prize. Yay!

If you are into computing, history, maths or comics you should have this book. A perfect stocking filler for Christmas, if you are in the habit of wearing quite large, book sized, stockings. 

It really is a great book. In fact, I'm going off to have a read of my copy now. 

Read "The Innovators"

For the past few weeks I've been working my way through "The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution" by Walter Isaacson. It's a great history of computing, all the way from the letters of Ada Lovelace to the spelling mistake that made Google what it is today.

If "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" have whetted your appetite for a book that gives the full story of the machines that underpin so much of our lives you should read this book. Well written and well referenced, with some great background material.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: Buy it

This is a completely brilliant book. The illustrations are fantastic and the research that backs up the content is exemplary. The book starts with the tragic and true story of Ada, Countess of Lovelace and her involvement with Charles Babbage, a 19th century inventor obsessed with the idea of using machines to perform mathematical calculations.

Ada has a background story that you really couldn't make up and the tale of how a poet's daughter became the first person on the planet to really think about what a computer could do is a compelling one.

Once the facts have been dealt with the action moves on into a parallel "Pocket Universe" where Lovelace and Babbage have built their huge steam-powered "Difference Engine" and are using it to solve mysteries and fight crime.

There are even jokes about cheese.

The narrative is littered with historical quotes and insights into maths and computing theory and gives a great introduction to what computers are about and where they came from. At the back you find get a series of appendices that supply plenty of historical context and by the end you really feel for the characters, in both their real and imagined forms.

Everyone should buy this book. It's just wonderful.

Galileo Book

If you have just got an Intel Galileo you might find this book interesting. It tells you how to get started with the device and gives a good overview of the Arduino technology on which the Galileo is based.

To be honest, if you are experienced with the Arduino you will probably already know the majority of the content, but I reckon that there is  enough Galileo specific content to make it worth the relatively modest asking price.  It's also kind of useful to have all the content in one place. Each feature of the Galileo is well explained and there is also some useful background on the Intel aspects of the device.

Note that this book is written for a Galileo configured as an Arduino based platform and does not cover the use of the device as part of the Microsoft Internet of Things initiative. 

Mijnlieff - hard to say, fun to play

Turns out that this is not a winning position if you are playing with the light tiles....

Last week in Whitby I bought a little two player game (there are some good game shops in Whitby - and a good sweet shop or two..). Anyway, this weekend we got around to playing it. 

The game is called MijnLeiff, a word my spelling checker doesn't know. Players take it in turns to put tiles down on a board with the aim of making rows of three or more of their own colour. What makes it more interesting is that the piece that you put down dictates where on the board your opponent can make their next move. And with a limited number of different pieces for each player it gets very, very, tactical towards the endgame. 

If you like games which are easy to pick up, quick to play and somewhat strategic, you will like this one.

Steve Jobs Biography

Steve Jobs was not a particularly nice person by all accounts. I’ve never had much time for folks who are horrible to other people and then claim they do this  “just because they are that way”. But he did make a lot of things. I’ve been working my way through his biography over the last few weeks and it is fascinating.

For me the best bits are at the beginning, when he and Steve Wozniak rode the personal computer wave and built a huge company from nothing. Towards the end the story turns into a succession of product meetings and multi-million dollar deals but it is a great read nonetheless.

Linux Format Coding Academy 2013

Computing is currently a bit fashionable, which is nice because there are loads of magazines of all flavours out there. And quite often a magazine will lump together a bunch of articles from previous issues and make a kind of “Greatest Hits” compilation. Linux Format has just done that and produced an edition it calls “Coding Academy 2013”.

It seems a bit expensive at 12.99 for what looks like a magazine, but when you consider that there are no advertisements it starts to look better value. There are introductions to Python, Ruby on Rails, Haskell, Scheme and Lisp along with features on Android development. It is all pretty well written, with examples and links to sample code.

If you have C# skills and are looking to find out the meaning behind some of the other words you hear bandied about when people talk computers you could do a lot worse than take a look. If you are complete beginner you might find the range of information a bit wide, but remember that you only have to learn one of these languages at a time.

I found my copy in the local newsagents, you can buy it online here.

You must meet Henrietta Lacks–in fact you may already have done

Read. This. Book. It is not about computers (at least so far, I’m just past half way through). It is about medicine, race and human nature. Anyone proposing a work of fiction that followed the story in this book would be dismissed as being fanciful and having ideas that were just too far fetched. And yet it is all true.

It tells the story of how the death of one woman led to the establishment of a whole branch of science. It will also tell you how cells work, how they go wrong and how we found out about a lot of this, just because of Henrietta Lacks.

You can track down a copy from here. It is also available for Kindle at a very good price.

Century 21 Comic Strips

As well as the Pacific Rim book (Pacific Rim? Sunday’s Post. You mean you’ve not been to see the movie yet. Shame) I also got a collection of Century 21 comic strips. We used to get TV21 magazine every week, and after dad had finished reading it I was allowed to take a look.

Anhyoo, the Thunderbirds strips were always the best. They were illustrated by Frank Bellamy who was the only one who seemed to be allowed to put his name on the strip. With good cause. I still reckon this was some of the best comic art ever. Don’t believe me? Grab a copy of the book and take a look. There are actually only a couple of Thunderbirds strips in the book, but the other ones are a good bunch too.

And I’ve just found out that there are lots more available too, which could prove expensive…

Thunderbirds are Go

When I was a kid in the sixties (yes I am very old) a must view TV program was Thunderbirds. We first watched it on our old black and white telly which took ages to warm up. It wasn’t until we saw some magazines pictures that we actually found out the colours of the Thunderbird craft. I’ve never really understood why Thunderbird 2 is green, but I digress. The franchise has been round a few times since, with a major revival in the nineties. (At this point I shall gloss over the awful film from 2004).

Anyhoo, one of my birthday presents was a copy of the Hayes Thunderbirds Manual, which gives a detailed breakdown of the International Rescue organisation and their craft. I like this as much now as I would have done nearly fifty years ago. At first I thought it was a reprint of magazine articles of the time, but there is a lot more to it than that. The authors have made use of the wealth of resources gathered by Thunderbirds aficionados over the years and put them together into a very comprehensive and will written exposition of the Thunderbirds universe. There is even an episode guide right at the end of the book. If you have any interest in this fantastic series, then it is well worth a look.

Chris Wooding and the Ketty Jay

If you are looking for a bit of escapist Science Fiction/Fantasy stuff then take a look at Chris Wooding. I’ve just read the first of his Ketty Jay series and it is a rollicking good fun. If you enjoy Harry Harrison, Blake's Seven, Firefly kind of stuff then you’ll like this. A well written take on the “ship of misfits freebooting around falling into danger and adventure” kind of thing with plenty of action and a quite a few laughs.

Harry Harrison on Kindle

Riding on the train down to London today I was delighted to find that I can now get Harry Harrrison books for Kindle. Including the “Stainless Steel Rat” and my personal favourite “The Technicolor Time Machine”. One of the great questions of the age is “Why have no Harry Harrison books been made into films yet?”. His stuff reads like movie scripts in many ways and is just so darned well written and amusing that it really should be on the big screen.

If you like fast moving Sci-Fi with a humorous twist then you should get a one of his books and have a read. I’d recommend “The Stainless Steel Rat” for starters. Great fun.

The Thank You Economy

I’m trying a new thing where I read more books. I’ve worked out that a book on Kindle is less than the price of a couple of packets of cigarettes. If I read a book in two days (unlikely) this will still cost me less than a tobacco habit. And it is much less likely to kill me.

So, today on a whim I downloaded a copy of “The Thank You Economy” after I saw it in Joey deVilla’s blog. I’ve started reading it and it is rather interesting. It makes the point that in a world of connected and savvy consumers, who are going to Tweet, Blog and Facebook any bad customer experiences, a business can’t afford to upset folks in the way that it used to. Furthermore, if you give really good customer experiences you are creating a sales force out of the users of your products.

Apple are brilliant at this. I remember being told an awestruck tale of a dropped (and shattered) iPhone which was ‘Just replaced’ in an Apple Store. This is actually very good business sense. The hardware costs Apple very little, they can write the expense off against tax, and if their delighted customer tells ten people the story and a couple of them go Apple rather than Android then it will have paid for itself.

A couple of thoughts though. Some people seem just born to complain. I’ve stood behind examples of this genre in queue the Post Office, and I’m sure you have too. These folks have presumably got Twitter and Facebook accounts, so I wonder how this policy works with them. With a bit of luck the book will cover this a bit later on.

The other thing I was thinking was how we could apply this to my business, that of education. We work hard at Hull to can give students a great experience, but at the end of the day we also have to give some marks out which will not always be well received. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made was to hand out my teacher assessments after I’d given out the results on a course. Some of the students (who had not actually applied themselves very well and done badly as a consequence) took it upon themselves to deliver payback and the comments were so good they got stuck on the staff room wall for all to enjoy.

I’ve not finished the book, but I’m enjoying reading it. Like most good business books it is full of things that make you say “Well Duh!”, but you might not have actually thought of. It is worth a read, and will certainly do you more good than 40 cigarettes.

Best Practices from 'Hard Code'

I picked up a book while I was at PDC. it is a best practice book for software developers. And it is excellent. I really like Steve McConnell and the stuff that he writes but "Hard Code" from Eric Brechner (writing as the deliberately provocative "I M Wright") is just as solid on technique, and has a really good line in snappy titles and no-nonsense talk. (one of the early articles is called "Development schedules, flying pigs, and other fantasies")

The content is based on articles written by Eric for in-house magazines at Microsoft. The intention was to spark debate about what you should be doing when you try to construct systems out of software, and the best ways to make sure you do it right.

If you write code for a living, or are a student learning how to write code for a living, or just want to find out what makes developers go tick (and probably cuckoo as well) then this is a great book to get. Strongly recommended.

Sunday Reading

Spent a very pleasant part of Sunday reading The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett. Absolutely brilliant.

If you've not discovered the Diskworld books then good for you, because it means you'll have the pleasure of reading them for the first time. They are written with a lightness of touch, a cleverness and a humanity that nobody else can match.

Terry Pratchett was recently diagnosed with an early form of Senile Dementia which doesn't seem to be slowing him down much just yet, thank goodness. He is truly great writer who has not been granted anything like the recognition he richly deserves in spite (or, one wonders perhaps because of) his great popularity with huge numbers of readers.

"Upgrade Your Life" by Gina Trapani

Now here is a book I really do like. Generally I avoid "self help" books, seeing myself as mostly beyond help - especially from myself. However, having spent a while last week in the Tech-Ed bookstore reading this one and trying to make mental notes of all the good tricks presented in this book, I eventually cracked and bought a copy. And it is jolly good too.

It is broken down into chapters that deliver tips to improve your life. It starts with email and then move into data organisation, using the web effectively and even how to motivate yourself to get work done. None of it is really rocket science I suppose, but you have to know these things to be able to use them. For example, I didn't know that Outlook has an option that lets you display all email sent only to you (as apposed to a list with you on it) as blue. (Tools->Organise->Using Colors). You can also flag messages from different people in different colours.

You can read the book from cover to cover and try to remember everything, or you can dip into it at random in the sure knowledge that you will learn something useful. The content is based on material presented over the years at lifehacker.com and covers Windows and Mac platforms, along with good old common sense.

Great stuff.

"Microsoft 2.0" by Mary Jo Foley

Whilst I was at TechEd last week someone gave me a free copy of "Microsoft 2.0" by Mary Jo Foley". It is supposed to tell me "How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era". I'm not sure it does.  I summarised it as follows:

• Bill Gates is leaving Microsoft and other people will be doing his job
• The Future for Microsoft is complicated, and almost certainly not the same as The Present

There is a lot of background on the people at Microsoft, which stops just shy of being libelous in some cases. There is some detail on products and where they might be going in the future which you can pick up more easily (and in an up to date form) on the web. There is a a fair bit of repetition. And more than a few errors. The Xbox 360 has never suffered from the "Three Rings of Death" - that just sounds like a very dangerous circus. And Microsoft didn't actually manage to buy Yahoo that I recall...

Each page has big callouts on it, presumably designed for high flying types who don't want to read all the text (and it also reduce the number of words required to fill the 283 pages). My favourite is on page 191 "Microsoft must avoid several obstacles as it moves from the old way of doing business to the new." Yeah. Right.

I did not like this book much, and I got it for free. If I'd paid 29 dollars for it I would be rather cross. Perhaps the detail was lost on me, or perhaps I already know a fair bit of what was being said. Either way, take a look at the text before you part with any cash.

Superb Micro Framework Book

There is already one superb .NET Micro Framework book available (the one wot I helped to write) but now there is another.

Expert .NET Micro Framework by Jens Kuhner is excellent. It is written for those who want to really find out how to use all the features of the framework.

Whereas our book is more of an introduction to the field the Expert book, as the name implies, goes into more detail on the various class libraries and how you can use them. It also has the benefit of having been published a year or so later, and so has more up to date detail on the platforms that are now available. The people "lucky" enough to be at my session yesterday all got a free copy of the book (which really put a spring in their step) and they will find it very useful.

If you are serious about the framework you should get this book. If you are not serous about the framework you should this book and become serious about it.

Why Software Sucks...

There are some books that anyone working with computers should just read. Code Complete by Steve McConnell is one of them. And now I've found another one.

Why Software Sucks... (and what you can do about it)  is by David Platt is a book you really should get. It is not hugely technical. It is not hard to read. It will make you laugh (and if you are a developer promptly feel guilty). It is a text which takes as its starting point the fact that we are not really very good at writing software.

It ties in rather neatly with a lot of things that I tell our students when they are writing programs for other people to use, but it also touches on security and a whole host of other issues, always with humour and always grounded in real life experience.

Even (or especially) if you are not a programmer you must read this book. Excellent stuff.