Category: Books/Reviews

The Footprints of God : A Novel
Iles, Greg
Rick Klau recommended this book to me at a blogger get together in Chicago back in March. Finally had a chance to read it last week during a little vacation time. Rick gets to recommend books to me anytime he wants from now on.

I hadn’t read any of Iles’s books before. Now, I’ll be looking for them. It’s your basic techno-thriller. The hero David Tennant is an M.D. serving as the resident ethicist on a secret project to build an intelligent supercomputer. There’s a bit of speculation on what might happen at the intersection of brain-imaging technologies and quantum computing, but it’s really only enough to propel the plot. That’s why I put this in the category of a techno-thriller rather than science fiction. It’s much the way that Michael Crichton’s fiction works. He’s not a science fiction writer in my book either. But you don’t really care much about that as the plot hurtles along. A much better than average summer read.

Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
Johnson, Steven
Not quite as provocative as Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, this is still well worth your time if you have any interest in how your mind works. Johnson uses himself as guinea pig to explore what science and medicine have been learning about how the low level hardware of your brain works and how that might hook in to what passes for thought and consciousness.

Iron Sunrise
Stross, Charles
A loose sequel to Singularity Sky in that it continues the adventures of that book’s protagonists, Iron Sunrise is a much more coherent and compelling story. Stross is setting up a nice post-singularity universe where the potent technologies and capabilities of his heros are nicely offset by equally potent capabilities among the bad guys.

Nobody’s a villain in their own story and Stross tells a great tale about how human conflict will continue to play out in a future filled with plausibly advanced technology and plausibly flawed human beings. Stross in definitely now on my list of must read authors.

LDAP Directories Explained: An Introduction and Analysis
Arkills, Brian
I needed to get less ignorant about LDAP and this filled the bill nicely. It gave me enough background, well-enough organized and presented, that I can now keep up in conversations about the topic when I have to.

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition
Meyer, Eric A.
Worthy of all the praise it has gotten around the web. Together with …. this is a must have book if you do any sort of web design at all. Even for someone like me who’s only a web designer at the fringe of my other work, this is worth having and reading.

Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design
Eric A. Meyer
While it’s been on my shelf for a while, I didn’t get around to this until this spring when I was tweaking my blog design and trying to migrate away from the default table-based designs of Radio toward more use of CSS and style-based designs. I’m not really all the way there yet, but this has helped considerably.

Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air
Dicum, Gregory
My travel preference is to book the window seat as a general rule. If you’ve been opting for the aisle seat, this book could change your mind. While I’ve always enjoyed picking out what I could figure out on my own, this book gives me a whole new set of things to look for. Better yet, it uses what you can see as a launching point into little lessons on geology and and human impact on geology. It’s a sturdy and compact enough book that you can toss it in your carryon bag just in case.

Microsoft OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Carter, Todd W.
A useful quickstart to using OneNote, particularly given that you’re likely to get OneNote without a manual. Like most of these “manual replacement” books, the emphasis is on walking you through all the menus and options. What it doesn’t provide is much in the way of guidance about how you might want to use OneNote as a component of your day-to-day work. While there appear to be books coming out now that address that issue, I would suggest you start with Chris Pratley’s WebLog as a source of real insight into OneNote

Online! The Book
Dvorak, John C. and Chris Pirillo.
OK for relative beginners, which is its target audience. On the other hand, not really up to the quality I would expect from Dvorak and Pirillo based on their other work.

I confess that Wolfram’s New Kind of Science has been gathering dust on one of my shelves. But it continues to intrigue me. Here’s some material courtesy of David Weinberger that may help when I do get around to finally reading it.

Wolfram explained. I just came across a Forbes article by Michael S. Malone, dated 11.27.00, called “God, Stephen Wolfram and Everything Else.” It’s a good, non-technical introduction to Wolfram. Nicely done. Critics of Wolfram won’t find much to like in it, and I still think Ray Kurzweil’s piece is the best analysis/intro I’ve read, but Malone puts Wolfram into a useful perspective…. [Joho the Blog]