Winter Reads 2007/2008

- Beautiful Code (Oram / Wilson)
Leading programmers explain how they think (when programming in their favorite language). Gives an overview of programming paradigms and the one or other idea to lighten up bored software engineers.

- The Conquest of Nature (D. Blackbourn)
Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany
For me personally this is an intruging read, since the first chapter deals with the area where part of my ancestry originates, and the second chapter deals with the area where we live today.

- Wenn die Lichter ausgehen (E. Mann)
Some hints of times to come? I loved Klaus and Erika on the Riviera, here she muses about strange happenings in her Vaterland.

- Magrave of the Marshes (John Peel and S.Ravenscroft)
Autobiography of the most influential DJ in the world. Well, being one of the german teenagers who were the main listeners of his BFBS shows in the 70s and 80s, I owe this man the discovery of many of my favorite tunes.

- The Seventeen Provers of the World (F. Wiedijk)
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence - AI is still alive but not really kicking. Here is some verdict on the provers which may make software generation easier in the 21st century, if only the bean counters realize the value of software one day.

- The lost continent (B. Bryson)
rediscovering America? To be read soon. Some ten years ago I devoured Bryson's Walk in the Woods.

- Software Estimation (S. McConnell)
Demystifying the Black Art. Regardless of the way you "generate" software, this is a very useful book dealing with managers who not know nothing of work in the trenches.

- The World Travel Atlas (Kunt)
the Google Earth of maps, valuable views of places which are hardly covered by maps, normally.

- Mastering Regular Expressions (J.E.F. Friedl)
A classic on handling cute stuff with Perl and some other languages.

- The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages (G. Winskel)
This is a tough one, after being 20 years with the fuzzy "C" language, it is hard to deal with pure logic. But there's no easy way out of the software dilema - rising complexity and outsourcing.

- The Golden Compass (P. Pullman)
when winter decides to not come to our town any more, this one may replace Anderson's Kingdom of Snow for generations to come.

- Death March (E. Yourdon)
Though this is the second edition even the first edition (which I handed a colleague as my good-bye present when he went to Benq Mobile) hits many nerves: eternal business truth, not only for software projects.

- A Sand County Almanac (A. Leopold)
Essays on conservation from Round River, WI. Shocking how rotten the world already was, back in 1949, some hundred years into civilizing America. It details the many wrongdoing of man when encountering functioning natural systems. Also featuring the Colorado Delta, when still water flowing down the river there.

- Woord & Object (W.V.O. Quine)
When I bought this book in 1992 I was hardly aware on its implications on the world we call The Internet.