Anyone that’s either an information worker manager or looking for a job as an information worker seriously needs to read this book.

It contains both information about how you can summon Holgar Dansk to reduce the madness and things to look out for so you can avoid getting yourself into a job where you need him.

No doubt, well written and largely relevant, it still suffers from some signs of it being mostly written in the 1970’s. Things that stick out like sore thumbs are ideas like assigng 7 or 8 support personnel to two programmers with only one doing any work and talking about higher level programming languages as something that may come to be popular in the future.

None the less, it’s important for its historical perspective and in general is a good review of how to keep a big software project from grinding to a halt.

I got this book because I wanted to get some basic introductions to a few of the technical prinicples of photography before I got my new camera. It served that purpose splendidly and also provided some insight into the more aesthetic principles.

Well, I’m done with it, sort of.

Like I said before, there is just SO much knowledge to absorb in this book. I think I’m going to get the third book in the Pragmatic Toolbox (The one on Automation), read that, and then go back and read all of these again (Skipping some sections that are tool specific).

Another excellent book from the Pragma Proggers. As opposed to the version control books, you may want to keep this one on your desk for a while until you get an iron grip on Unit Testing.

Not that it’s not as good as the SCCS books, just that the lessons take a little more to integrate in to your daily grind.

The book is absolutely filled to the brim with useful advice on the subject of being a better programmer and that, is in part, the problem. There’s no way to metabolize all this information. The pull out placard in the back is nice, but it’s still not perfect.

There needs to be, I dunno, some sort of cumulative excercise (the individual ones are nice, mind you) that makes you flex all the lessons in the book.

The book is definitley very interesting, Kessler spends a LOT of time in the Pre-Industrial Revolution and Industrial Revolution timeframe though, not nearly as much as he spends discussing the Information Revolution.

Another excellent, surreal, dark comedy from Wes Anderson.

Not much more to say about it except that the scoring was brilliant.

I’m hearing a lot of people panning this film and I have to say I don’t think they really understand just what the hell zombie films are about.

They’re not horror movies. The creeping fear that a good horror movie needs to sustain for 90-120 minutes just cannot be present in a good zombie film. Once the zombies have been understood, they’re not scary. Zombies films are about man vs nature, a peculair nature, true, but they’re not evil. The zombies serve to make men react, not proact. You can’t be proactive against zombies.

What makes Land of the Dead good as I see it is the internal consistency and nuance that Romero built into the film. It’s a world where you can believe the situation (assuming the basic buy that the dead have come back to life and have a taste for the flesh of the living). One nice thing is the gradual arc that Romero’s built between Day of the Dead and this film play on Zombie’s gaining basic reasoning skills. Bub and Big Daddy were both played charismatically and minimally, sharing a lot of the same traits that make Frankenstein’s monster (from the films mind you, not the book) sympathetic.

I think the biggest reason why so many people are dissapointed is that they walk in looking for a summer popcorn movie and get something much more intricate and complicated. A lot of the movie is played out in the subtext and despite complaints to the contrary, the film is better for it.

A really great introduction to the reasons and processes of version control.

Don’t let the title fool you, this isn’t a book for people that want to learn just Subversion, heck, the main chunk of the book really doesn’t even go all that in depth into SVN particularly (yeah it introduces you to the commands that’ll let you get stuff done), but where it really shinees is if you’ve heard about version control, always wanted to use it, but were just plain not sure how and where you should employ techniques.

I’m not sure if the stuff in this book is necessarily applicable to distributed source control applications, but for any centralized models, the basic themes have GOT to be similar and the stuff it teaches is really great if you’re learning version control for the first time (like me) and maybe even if you’re not a newb (so you can refresh your knowledge and maybe even pick up a trick or two).