Blog

The sequel to Catch-22, with the old characters. The same particular sort of humor is present throughout.

The early history of Christianity and the New Testament told in Cahill’s modern, idealistic, and readable style.

Thomas Cahill’s histories are absorbing and fun to read. I do get the feeling that he is oversimplifying in a breathless sort of Bill Moyers fashion.

Jim Hightower is cool. He’s an outspoken populist from Texas and writes in a fiery voice.

This is the Civil War diary of Alfred Brown Peticolas, my great-great-something grandfather. I bought it mainly because of the relation, but it ended up being interesting in itself. It also includes sketches he made during the period.

This is a fairly good introduction to the Python programming language. Its organization, however, makes it hard to use when you just want to refresh your memory about a particular detail you have forgotten.

This book is somewhat similar in scope to GTK+/Gnome Application Development, but of lesser quality. Like the other, it’s also becoming a bit obsolete.

This book was my first introduction to Perl and I can say it made my initial foray much easier. I haven’t picked it up since, but I’m glad I had it in the beginning.

This is a mammoth (1000+ pages) introduction to many different technologies available under Linux including databases, languages, GUIs, programming libraries, and more.

This book was written by a team of 14 or so people, who each wrote one or two chapters. Consequently, the book feels more like a collection of conference proceedings than a unified text. Specifically, the style, quality, and approach vary widely from chapter to chapter.

I don’t really like books like this. I prefer reading a consistent voice on a focused topic. For quick-and-dirty introductions to new technologies, I think the Web is a better resource.

This book was a good introduction to writing programs that use the Gnome environment. However, with the rapid changes in that system, this book is getting somewhat long in the tooth.