Sorry, I don't think most folks care what I read in 2011, but I wanted to check out Bagcheck.com's embed feature. Nothing to see here. Move along. (And of course, I've pretty much now guaranteed this post will get 20-30 comments...)
I've recently completed two incredible books I thought I'd review today. As always I'm curious to see what others think so if you have read these as well, definitely chime in. I've also got two super quick video game reviews at the very bottom. Enjoy.
As it is a lazy Sunday morning I thought I'd share a few quick reviews on some games, books, comics I'm consuming lately. If you purchase any of these via the links provided I get a small kickback. (Just an FYI, not sure if I should 'warn' people about that or not. ;)
This is the second collection of short stores I've read edited by John Adams. His first collection (well the first I read) was an incredible collection of zombie stories. (The Living Dead) When I heard he was editing a collection of dystopian stories I figured it was a no-brainer. The collection is pretty good. I'd only read one story in the entire book and only recognized another one. There's quite a bit here to like and I definitely recommend it, but I have one problem with the collection. For some reason, Adams feels the need to provide - at least to me - spoilers for every single darn story. Not huge stories mind you. But consider this. In a zombie collection, you can be pretty assured that every story will contain, well, zombies. In a collection of dystopian literature, you really don't know much at all. Sure you have the broad strokes, but the details are where things will get interesting. Will it be a more bleak world like "1984" or something else entirely like "Brave New World"? The odd thing is - Adams introduced each story with - what I thought - a telling clue that ruined the surprise for you. Imagine seeing "Logan's Run" for the first time (see it - don't read it - the book was pretty awful) and having no idea what the "catch" was. Certainly you figure it out pretty quickly, but that's what Adams seemed to ruin before each and every story. After I noticed this before the first few stories, I simply skipped his introductions.
And now for something really different. Bulletstorm - AKA the game that got you the GOW MP beta - was a hell of a lot of fun. I can't remember the last time I laughed out loud so many times while playing a game. It's fun. A lot of fun. Is it as cool as "Call of Duty"? Nah. But for pure FPS fun, this was a great game. Every aspect of the game is focused on making shooting bad guys an enjoyable experience. From getting bonuses for shooting them in the no-no spots (yes, I said no-no spot) to additional bonuses for sending your target into a giant cactus. I didn't try the multiplayer so I can't comment on that, but the single player game was great and I'd recommend it to anyone.
Have you ever begun reading a book where you only had the vaguest idea of what the story was and found yourself completely surprised? That's how I was with the Hunger Games trilogy. All I knew about it was "young adult dystopian fiction". That's it. Within about 5 pages I was completely addicted. I honestly don't know how this could be young adult fiction. Sure the writing is pretty simple but the content is... well - not inappropriate. Just dark. Incredibly dark. I can't remember being so depressed by a book since I read "1984." They are making a movie out of this and I honestly don't know how I feel about it. On one hand if they truly honor the book and keep the incredible darkness of the novels intact, it could be too difficult to watch. If they neuter it though that would be a shame as well. Either way - I'd recommend the entire series. You can probably read them back to back over a week - just keep the Lithium handy.
And just to wrap things up - a few comics I'm reading lately:
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A few months ago, Brian Kotek recommended I pick up a book called "Clean Code" by Robert C. Martin. I picked it up, put it in my "To Read" queue, and promptly forgot about it for a while. Then one day I had a long plane ride coming up and as I was wrapping up another book, I threw in "Clean Code" so I'd have something to start reading. (Am I the only who absolutely fears being on a plane with nothing to do?)
Within five minutes of cracking open the book, I had dug into my backpack, brought out my pen, and was underlining madly. I had not known really want to expect, but it turns out that this is easily (for me anyway) one of the most important programming books I've read in my life.
I absolutely will not do it justice, but at a high level, the book concerns itself with the quality of the code you produce. This covers everything from variable naming, class and method structure, commenting, etc. Martin goes into a level of detail I frankly did not know was even possible. We all "know", for example, what makes up good variable naming rules, but Martin goes into the theory at a level I had not thought of before.
What makes this incredible is that after numerous chapters talking about best practices and what you should and should not do, Martin follows it up with an extremely in depth code refactoring. You see the original code and you get to follow the author's thought process as he makes changes. I'll point out that the code used in book is Java, but everything discussed is more than applicable to other languages, especially ColdFusion.
If there is one section I especially liked it was the one discussing method structure, including naming, their impact on the rest of your code, and even the number of arguments the method accepts. It really made me think that I need to reconsider how I use CFCs.
The book is not without controversy of course. Martin says right out (and more than once), that he expects you to disagree with him. I found his comments on, well, commenting, to be a bit extreme at times. I absolutely loved that section though (as a side note, it is the same reason I like listening to Rush sometimes - it's more fun to listen to someone you don't agree with!) This quote probably exemplifies Martin's core feeling on quotes: "Comments are always failures." Pretty strong, right? While he is certainly not against all code, I do think he isn't considering the situation I know others have seen - years old code that may have made perfect sense to a developer in 2002, but makes no sense 8 years later.
I strongly urge my readers to pick this up. It is not something you will likely "get" in a first reading. I'm planning on rereading it again in a few months. I'm also considering forming a presentation based on the material. But all in all I can think of no other book I'd recommend to a developer looking to raise the level of their craft.
p.s. Let me add that - in the same vein - Dan Wilson's CF Online Meetup presentation covered some of the same concepts yesterday. You can watch the streaming recording of it here.
I've mentioned my admiration for author China Mieville before. I think he is the best writer alive today. I've yet to read a book of his that wasn't both well written and incredibly fascinating. It's been a while since his last book so I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about his latest novel, "The City & The City."
At its heart, "The City & The City" is a typical detective/murder mystery novel. The protagonist, Tyador Borlu, is a detective in the city of Beszel. Beszel is somewhere in Eastern Europe and isn't doing so great economically. Its sister city, Ul Qoma, however, is prospering. Tyador is tasked with investigating a murder of a young woman and soon finds himself embroiled in a crime that spans both cities.
As I said - fairly typical. However - there is one important aspect to the two cities. They aren't "sister cities" as in two close cities. Both cities actually occupy the same physical place. Yes - the same physical space. But wait - it gets better. Citizens of each city are trained - mentally - to simply ignore the other city. So you can be walking down one road and have the other city, physically, five feet from you. If a person you know is walking in the other city, you can't speak to them. You can't wave. You can't do anything that acknowledges their presence.
If that sounds weird... well it is. Mieville never actually comes out and states if something magical is going on here. Rather it is left to the reader to determine if there is some multi-dimensional hocus pocus are simply a mass form of self-delusion.
Mieville does an awesome job of combing both a great scifi/fantasy story along with an intricate mystery novel. I strongly recommend this novel, especially since it is also one of the more approachable Mieville novels. If you like this, definitely check out "King Rat", and when you are ready, "Perdido Street Station."
Please consider yourself warned. This review will contain spoilers. If you had any plans on reading this book, you may want to stop reading now. On the other hand, since this book reads like it was written by a high school creative writing wanna-be fan boy, you may not really care. Ok, you have been warned...
One of the books that came up at the SciFi BOF back at CFUNITED was World War Z. The book is written as if it were non-fiction. It is a collection of numerous interviews from folks who have survived a zombie war. It's ten years past the end of the major fighting (although a few pockets of zombies still exist) but in general the view point is of a world that has survived the worst of it.
Consider a normal zombie film. The hero wakes up, sees that something is seriously wrong, runs to some safe haven (like a mall), meets a few other survivors, one of which who will do something dumb and force them to flee, and that's it.
When I watch a film like this (or really, any 'end of the world' type film), I know the geek in me starts going crazy. If the film centers in on one city, I wonder what's going on in some other city. If the film takes place over a few days, I wonder what the world likes 5, 10, etc years from then. Obviously most films and books will focus on one sort of characters, but what makes WWZ so amazing is that you get an incredible range of view points.
The book is roughly separated into stories from various parts of the war. From when things begin to go crazy, to the panic, the fighting, and the aftermath. You get views from everyone, and I mean everyone. From Asia to Russia to England to America (and they even mention Lafayette, LA!).
The book begins by saying it is an emotional view of the history, but really, for a geek, it's has an amazing amount of resources about what was going on. Some of the cooler aspects include a detailed look into how the military dealt, and adapted, to the zombie threat as well as how the government helped rebuild the country with a dramatically reduced work force.
So while I'm focusing on the geek aspect of the book - the emotional part works well. There is one interview - it involves a girl who lost her parents - and I don't want to say much more as it will ruin it - but it is easily one of the most creepy things I've read in my life. What happens at sea is also pretty darn scary as well. I know there are plans to turn this into a movie - and if they do - I hope they focus on the people and not some giant CGI-fest. If they could pull off the horror of the stories with good actors it could be a heck of a lot more creepy than Dawn of the Dead. I should say though - as I've gotten older I've really begun to get turned off by gore. Frankly I appreciate a movie that can do more with less. I know Blair Witch Project was way over-hyped, but it scared the you know what out of me without ever showing the big bad monster.
Anyway, I enjoyed this book so much I put down my current novel and finished the whole thing in about 2 days. Because of the nature of the book, a collection of interviews, it reads very fast and makes a great bathroom book. I'd definitely recommend it!
Thanks to John Farrar for alerting me of this, but a new ColdFusion 8 book has been announced:
ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial
It covers CF 8.0.1 and is expected sometime in August.
So I've been thinking about this for quite some time now, and I figured today was as good as any other day to blog it. This may be a rather morbid blog post, but I'd be willing to bet I'm not the only one here who has thought about what I'm about to say.
I was browsing Target of all places when this book caught my eye. The Intellectual Devotional is similar to those religious books which provide a daily scripture reading. This book focuses on American history (there is an earlier book which is more general and provides a daily reading in various areas. So one day may cover early American literature while another will cover military history. This is one of the coolest books I've ever picked up. Each reading takes less than five minutes but gives you a good understanding of the topic. I've especially liked the pages on early American writers, something I've wanted to learn more about for a while. If I were a bit indelicate I'd say it's the perfect bathroom book. (Ok, I'll say it.) Anyway, I'd definitely recommend picking it up!
