No Content, No Fuss: Category books

Practical OCaml

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:12:00 +0100

I noticed on the OCaml mailing list that Practical OCaml is due to be released in the US quite soon. Could this be the first real competition that Jon Harrop will face for his excellent but pricey Objective Caml for Scientists ?!

Things are heating up on the OCaml book front at last, and Jon has been getting some rave reviews of his book! We have a long-running joke about how much I hate the colour syntax highlighting he used in his book, and it amused me greatly to note that someone else in the comments for the rave review of his book also shared my heretical opinion, ha ha!

Incidentally, I just pushed the beginnings of an OCaml config file parsing library to the Melange source tree. The code in there is almost beginning to look useable...

Book: The World is Flat

anil@recoil.org (Anil Madhavapeddy) — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 22:32:00 +0100

A fellow passenger on a flight from New York to San Francisco was reading an interesting book called "The World is Flat: a brief history of the 21st century" (amazon). I'm on the same flight a few weeks later, so I picked up a copy to pass the time and have discovered one of the best books I've read in a long time!

The author, Thomas Friedman, works for the New York Times as their foreign affairs correspondent, and this book is packed full of references to interviews he has conducted with people ranging from the CEOs of multinational companies (e.g. the heads of Wipro and Infosys in India), all the way to small business owners in China and India.

His thesis is that the "world is flat" due to the convergence of factors ranging from the obvious: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of personal computing, to the seemingly boring: supply chain management by Walmart. Where the book excels is its engaging presentation; rather than adoptic a polemic, argumentative style, Friedman instead quotes interviews with someone relevant to the field at hand. Books like this often annoy me with technical inaccuracies when they cover topics such as open-source software, but Friedman has great discussions with people such as Brian Behlendorf and Craig Mundie!

I'm still working my way through it (next hop: NYC to SFO), but the first half has been fantastic and has really changed my views (read: woken me up) to just how integral out-sourcing is to successfully conduct business today. The book, much like the content it presents, is studiously up-to-date as of 2006, and the author apparently plans to continue to keep it as a "presentist" publication which conveys a sense of the current state of the world and not the past or future.

Fun with Asterix

avsm — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 17:51:00 +0100

Assaulted by a fit of nostalgia, I browsed around Amazon and managed to find a whole bunch of Asterix comics! Seems Americans know almost nothing about the best kid's books ever, which is a great pity. I think the best one ever is Asterix and the Big Fight, but I'm having trouble locating it. Best character name goes to Boneywasawarriorwayayix from Corsica.
The best bit about it is all the little details you only notice on the second reading! If anyone knows good places to get some of the older out-of-print versions of the book, I'd love to know ...