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A very good collection of stories, loosely connected by Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk across the Twin Towers in 1974.

Brilliant. The art and the industry of film, under the microscope of a master.

Really liked this one. Some great stories and a readable style, in a quick dash through much of the twentieth century.

I very much enjoyed this short but illuminating commentary on the complete text of the US Constitution. It starts with a brief historical narrative and then proceeds article by article, and then amendment by amendment, explaining the major case history surrounding each.

One thing I never noticed before: the US Constitution contains the word “speedy”. How cool is that?

This is a nice complement to the Armstrong book. In particular, it has a great discussion of the Erlang tracing mechanisms.

A wonderful feat of story-telling.

Part 14: When a Deferred Isn’t

This continues the introduction started in the first part. You can find an index to the entire series.

Introduction

In this part we’re going to learn another aspect of the Deferred class. To motivate the discussion, we’ll add one more server to our stable of poetry-related services. Suppose we have a large number of internal clients who want to get poetry from the same external server. But this external server is slow and already over-burdened by the insatiable demand for poetry across the Internet. We don’t want to contribute to that poor server’s problems by sending all our clients there too.

It certainly is gentle, and is spruced up with some interesting bits about the history of statistics. I would have liked more in-depth explanations of the statistical techniques, though. This book will teach you how to perform basic statistical analysis, but won’t really enlighten you as to how, and why, it works.

The perils of positive thinking. Or, as the late, great Shel Silverstein put it: “THINKING you can just ain’t enough!”

Part 13: Deferred All The Way Down

This continues the introduction started in the first part. You can find an index to the entire series.

Introduction

Recall poetry client 5.1 from Part 10.The client used a Deferred to manage a callback chain that included a call to a poetry transformation engine. In client 5.1, the engine was implemented as a synchronous function call implemented in the client itself.

Now we want to make a new client that uses the networked poetry transformation service we wrote in Part 12. But here’s the wrinkle: since the transformation service is accessed over the network, we’ll need to use asynchronous I/O. And that means our API for requesting a transformation will have to be asynchronous, too. In other words, the try_to_cummingsify callback is going to return a Deferred in our new client.