John Doe's personal blog

Here are the last of the “leftovers” from the project:
Squeak by Example
The WikiBook ‘Practical PHP Programming’
Basics of Algebra and Analysis for Computer Science
Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming [pdf]
.Net Book Zero
Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++

There’s plenty more still to come, and if you apply a little bit of your own energy, there are many out there to be found.

If you do find something you really enjoy, drop me an email or let me know in the comments here.

Our ISP has a planned maintenance outage for the UPS unit powering our machine on Mon Feb 02 17:00:00 MST 2009. It should last about 4 hours and may result in the site being unreachable for that period.

Some books we didn’t have time for:

Getting Started with awk
Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4
Logic, Programming and Prolog [pdf]
The Scheme Programming Language
A Tutorial on Pointers and Arrays in C
The OpenGL ‘Red Book’
Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl

Also, here’s an entire “directory” of online SciFi novels.

We’ll end the project with a list of Python books :

• Dive Into Python
• The Standard Python Library
• Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
• The Django Book
• Building Skills in Python and Building Skills in OO Design

Another great handbook to have around – The Handbook of Applied Cryptography

John Sundman dropped by my blog a few weeks ago and mentioned that his new novel, The Pains is also available now, as well as his novella Cheap Complex Devices

Jeff Zeldman writes, regarding The Pains:

The Pains is a story of faith in a world that appears to be falling apart. It tells the story of Norman Lux, a 24-year-old novitiate in a religious order, who becomes afflicted with something akin to stigmata.

Data Mining with R – R is an interesting language which recently made the New York Times.

Peter Watts has made his entire backlist available, but I recommend starting with Starfish.

Note: I had someone challenge the past few entries, suggesting I was running out of ideas for ‘recreational’ books – I can assure you, those are books that are very dear to my heart, and I would rather recommend them than any of the 15+ other books I have on my list because I do love them so much.

I repent! I never decided on a video for the “Sunday Special”, and the article self-published before I realized I had forgotten it. To make it up to you, I’m posting several:

Brian Cantwell Smith, dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto Smith, the author of “On the Origin of Objects,” combines degrees in computer science and philosophy and is an expert on the interdisciplinary convergence brought about by digitization. His talk is titled, “And Is All This Stuff Really Digital After All?”:rtsp://video1.c-span.org/project/digital/digitalfuture013105.rm

And a couple of items from the brilliant folks over at archive.org

From the National Film Registry comes His Girl Friday, a classic screwball comedy from 1940 starring Cary Grant.
Suddenly, a quirky thriller from 1954 starring Frank Sinatra.

The Internet Archive did a blog post a few years ago that points to all of Frank Baum’s works that they’ve categorized.

Another textbook, this time from MIT – How to Design Programs

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist Learning with C++ – also available in two Python editions, 1st and 2nd.

Little Women is another great classic that I really, really enjoy.

My Antonia is a very important book for me – when I read it in 3rd grade at the urging of a teacher, I was convinced there was nothing worth reading in the ‘Classics’ – they seemed likely to be dry and uninteresting compared to the scif/fantasy fare I was more fond of. It’s something like 24 years later, and the beauty of this book still haunts me.

Algorithms, a forthcoming textbook from the fine professors at Berkeley, is the more “technical” half of today’s post

Programming Ruby – The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide
H. G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine is worth a read if you like SciFi at all.

As of the time this post is being written, Robert Finn’s Underlife is the most downloaded book at the excellent free-book portal Manybooks.

Programming in Lua has a similar place in life – it’s popularity is under-appreciated. Sure, Lua’s not what most people would call a “mainstream” programming language. On the other hand, it’s the programming language for writing addons to the massively popular “World of Warcraft”, so…

Practical Common Lisp, which makes a great supplement to Day 9’s On Lisp, and 1633, the first sequel to Day 5’s 1632

Philip Greenspun is an interesting character. An instructor at MIT, he’s one those people that strikes me as “justifiably arrogant”, and has written two great books which are readily available online: Software Engineering for Internet Applications and SQL for Web Nerds. This second one focuses on Oracle – which is unusual for books that you can find free online – and actually helped me come up to speed with some of that RDBMS’ idiosyncrasies when I started at my current employer.

Another person who strikes me as “justifiably arrogant” would be Sherlock Holmes, and you can find The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes here. It contains the following Holmes stories:

• A Scandal in Bohemia
• The Red-Headed League
• A Case of Identity
• The Boscombe Valley Mystery
• The Five Orange Pips
• The Man with the Twisted Lip
• The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
• The Adventure of the Speckled Band (one of my favorites)
• The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
• The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
• The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
• The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

Jeffrey A. Carver’s entire series The Chaos Chronicles is joined today by Text Processing in Python, an incredibly handy book.