Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems - Galileo Galilei
Does the sun move around the earth or vice-versa?
Dialogue unfolds over four days among three people: Salviati, who argues that Copernicus was right and that Earth orbits the Sun; Sagredo, an intelligent everyman; and Simplicio, who has latched onto the Sun orbiting the Earth out of an uncritical deference to Aristotle and Ptolemy.
This book inspires awe in the power of the human . . .
Writing Solid Code - Steve Maguire
Microsoft at the zenith of C programming.
You can dismiss Writing Solid Code as a paltry set of rules for writing C for a vanished era of PCs, but if you put it in context, if you read between the lines a bit, this is an amazing book.
It's 1993. Microsoft is near the height of its powers: Windows 3.11 is released that December. Windows 95 development is under way. The . . .
Books Which Spark Joy
These are the ones I kept.
I use Mari Kondo's method from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up where you only hang onto things which spark joy. This is a catalog of books which sparked joy for me. This is a work in progress. There's a lot of sparkles of joy to get through.
- Cron, Lisa, Story Genius.
- Galilei, Galileo. Dialogue Concerning the . . .
Digital Signal Processing - Steven W. Smith
A practical guide in an impractical language.
I avoided learning DSP for a long time. It was something arcane which Real Engineers understood. This book helped me get over that.
The first thing you notice about Digital Signal Processing: A Practical Guide for Engineers and Scientists is the code listings: They're all in BASIC! All the abstraction is stripped away and how . . .
A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
One of my formative memories of reading.
One of my earliest reading memories is my mother reading the Earthsea trilogy to my older brothers and me at bedtime. We had the three books in one volume. I reread it when I was in high school a dozen years after that and it was completely falling apart by then.
Some day I'll be completely falling apart too, I suppose, but for . . .
Story Genius - Lisa Cron
One of my four favourite fiction writing books.
The risk with books about writing is you could spend all of your time reading them and never, you know, actually write. So I have restricted my diet of writing books to just four. Story Genius' exercises actually got me writing, but there's some theory and structure behind it—it's not one of those awful "formula" . . .
Hello, World. Again.
I blog again after a decade+ break.
Whoosh, that went by quickly. A lot happened since 2009.
Cleaning out my bookshelf I realized there's a lot of books I love here, and it would be fun to write a brief post about each one and why I've hung onto it, so I'll start there. Sober blog rants will no doubt follow.
My old blog still exists inside the . . .