Reading Matters

I've been reading a fair bit over the last few months, not all Warhammer 40,000, mostly finishing off stuff I've been reading throughout the year.

The Artist, The Philosopher and the Warrior by Paul Strathern

No, not one of those Californian new age self-help type books, but a history of the Italian Renaissance.

During the Autumn of 1503, Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli were assigned by the Florentine government to follow Cesare Borgia (the Pope's illegitimate son) as part of his army, da Vinci to be his chief engineer and Machiavelli as a representative/spy. The story is a potted history of the three men, up to the time they were involved, what happened in those months and afterwards. In particular, the affect Borgia had on the thinking of the other two, especially his role in formulating Machiavelli's book, The Prince.

The book is a good read and fills in a lot of the background to The Borgias TV series.

Think Like a Programmer by V. Anton Spraul

Yeah, yeah, what am I doing reading this. It's a book on the philosophy of programming, which is to solve problems using software, and very good: worth a read even for the experienced programmer. There is a very good chapter on recursion, some of which is available here. It's the kind of book which takes you further than just the basic "Ruby in 17 afternoons"-type book, but doesn't get too academic like some algorithms books.

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

One of his non-Revelation Space novels, this is about a clone-family six million years in the future who have been almost wiped out and their investigation as to who's behind it.

I've read one or two of his novels by now and this one's not bad. Reynolds does seem to be a bit long winded, though, and you feel at the end like saying "Oh, is that all it was?", although it is quite imaginative, and it is well written, like all his books.

Shady Illuminations in the PragPub Magazine

I've been going through some back issues of this reading all the articles written by John Shade. He's quite a good writer, although a bit erratic, and his article on Steve Jobs (when he left Apple for the last time) was insightful, as was his latest one on comparing K&R's "The C Programming Language" with with Stroustrup’s "The C++ Programming Language" (the latter being 1000 pages longer than the former):