I get nearly zero time to read lately. Too much stuff going on, including a toasted BIOS on my primary work PC. (Yeah, it had my PDC presentations on it...You'd think working at a storage company for many years would have taught me to back my work up. *sigh*)
But I have a rule that I must read for at least 4 hours per week. Anything less than that, and I fear brain rot. Here are some current and recent reads:
| The Design and Evolution of C++ -- Bjarne Stroustrup |
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9 of 10.
I am thouroughly enjoying this one. It takes a historical tour of the design and evolution of the C++ language, from it's inception based on Bjarne's work with Simula in the late 70's, to his C with Classes, it's codification as C++, and its evolution from 1.0 and beyond. Great insight into why certain decisions were made, and a great way to get some context around where we are today and how we got here. |
| Fundamentals of Parallel Processing -- Harry F. Jordan, et al |
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9 of 10.
A fairly detailed tour of the parallel processing space, with some practical advice as it pertains to modern shared memory architectures and systems. I mentioned it a few weeks back, but I'm just now reading straight through the book. Material is introduction-to-medium-level, but offers some meaty chunks (whatever that means...it just came out, sorry) in many areas. Especially good coverage on data dependence analysis. |
| Customizing the CLR -- Steven Pratschner |
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8 of 10.
I bought this book primarily for its coverage of Constrained Execution Regions, Critical Finalization, and reliability as it pertains to our hosting APIs. But then I started reading from the beginning and couldn't stop. This book will certainly serve as a good reference for anybody doing hosting coding, and could serve as a source of endless hours of fun...just toying around with some of the cool extensibility hooks the CLR provides. Happy hacking! |
| Dude, Did I Steal Your Job? Debugging Indian Computer Programmers -- N. Sivakumar |
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7 of 10.
Despite it's potentially offensive title, this book offers interesting insight from an Indian programmer working in the United States. Funny, entertaining, and very raw (i.e. little to no editing). I am slightly annoyed by the triple spaced typesetting, but so be it. Definitely a lighter read than my norm, but it's a welcome change. |