Book reviews

In the last few years I spent my summer breaks writing all the code I couldn't write during the semester. This year it was all different. You might have guessed it already because I wrote just a single update since July. Except for the Khallenge I don't think I actually wrote any serious code. So what have I done in the mean time? I read a lot. Mainly math and economics, some history and anthropology and even one book that is vaguely related to programming (How would you move Mount Fuji; it has some awesome riddles).

This post merely serves to prove that I'm not dead yet. I merely didn't actually do anything I could present on this website during the last months. The math books might fit in here best, so let's review them. It's not quite "Programming Stuff" but I always liked writing book reviews and I haven't reviewed anything in a while.

Over the summer I read seven math books. Well, technically I read only five because I'm not yet done with two but I'm making good progress. The titles of these books are "Foundations and Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics", "Concepts of Modern Mathematics", "The Equation that couldn't be solved", "The Nothing that is", "Introductory Graph Theory", "Categories and Computer Science", and "Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists". The first four books put various aspects of math in its proper historical context. That's something I always missed in school. Ergo I need to spend my free time to learn about these things. The last three books are about actual math.

For the sake of the structure of this post I'm not going to review the books in the order I read them. Instead I'm going to review them in the order that makes most sense. It's probably the order you should check them out if you feel like reading them.

Continue reading "Book review - A quintuple of math books"

Santa came in the shape of my grandmother and hooked me up with a bunch of awesome new books. One of these books was "The Haskell School of Expression" written by Paul Hudak, CS professor at Yale University and one of the leading heads in Haskell development. Nice book, 4.5 stars on Amazon but I didn't like this book at all at first.

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Link: C++ Template Metaprogramming - Concepts, Tools, and Techniques from Boost and Beyond

Template Metaprogramming is a compile-time C++ technique that became extremely popular in the last few years. Before the arrival of this book there was nevertheless no comprehensive source about template programming available. Interested C++ programmers who wanted to read more about this topic were mostly limited to Modern C++ Design (uses template metaprogramming a lot; doesn't explain too much about it though), C++ Templates - The complete guide (dedicates one chapter to template metaprogramming), the source and documentation of the Boost library and some other, minor sources. David Abrahams and Aleksey Gurtovoy attempted to fill this void and they've been succesful.

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C++ Coding Standards - 101 Rules, Guidelines and Best Practices is the latest book from the two C++ heavyweights Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu. The content of the book is organized in the good tradition of Scott Meyer's "Effective C++" and Herb Sutter's "Exceptional C++" series which I'm sure most C++ programmers are familiar with.

As the title of the book implies it contains 101 guidelines which are themselves organized into 12 bigger chapters. Like in all other books of this kind the content is more or less organized from simple to difficult starting with very general advice that can be just as useful in non-C++ projects in chapter 1 and going right down into the messy details of standard C++ in later chapters.

During the 12 chapters the book discusses the following issues (I give the chapter names here): Organizational and Policy Issues; Design Style; Coding Style; Functions and Operators; Class Design and Inheritance; Construction, Destruction and Copying; Namespaces and Modules; Templates and Genericity; Error Handling and Exceptions; STL Containers; STL Algorithms; Type Safety.

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