books category archive

Steven Levy = Awesome Writer

Hackers

Many years ago I read Hackers for the first time and thoroughly enjoyed it. Levy takes exhaustive research and interviews and weaves them in to a great tale. I like reading about the people behind technology and how they came to do what they do (or did what they did), and this book is full of characters and their stories: “The Heroes of the Computer Revolution.” Starting with the origins of hacker culture at MIT in the Tech Model Railroad Club, I felt transported back in time and was absorbed by the story.

Crypto

A month ago, I saw a reference to Levy’s Crypto, and I immediately ordered a used copy from Amazon. This is …

Goals: Learning Python and Regular Expressions

I don’t want to go all 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on you, but I’ll say this: I think it’s good to have goals and to work towards your goals.

I like this quote, which I’ve seen attributed to Zig Ziglar:

“Most people fail to reach their goals not because their plans are too simple or too complicated. Most people don’t reach their goals because they’re not committed and willing to follow their plans.”

I think that’s very true. There are so many things I haven’t done because I didn’t follow through on a plan.

What this means for you, loyal reader, is that one of the reasons I’m not accomplishing the goal of writing more for the web site (including a write-up of …

Review: Iron Maiden Biography by Mick Wall

Run to the Hills: Iron Maiden, the Authorised Biography, by Mick Wall

I’m not sure if I should mention this, since it could affect the willingness of people to loan me books, but I do a lot of my reading in the bathroom. Some books don’t grab me enough to carry out of the bathroom and it can take a while to get through them. This wasn’t one of those books.

(Oh, by the way, I’m giving you a review of a book that seems to be out of print. I don’t even see used copies at Amazon as I write this.)

I wouldn’t say the book is especially well written. (Much like this post and web site.) It’s a bit fannish in parts. It can …

Thoughts on Invention, Innovation, and Patents from ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’

Originally published 17 October 2007 in Free Software Magazine.

I’m working on Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Good book so far, although I’ve ground almost to a halt halfway through. (I’d probably make better progress if it showed up in blog-sized chunks in my feed reader every day.) I like sweeping accounts of history, and this one presents many new ways to look at things. It also gets me thinking about the current sorry state of the patent system, with these excerpts:

All this is not to deny that Watt, Edison, the Wright brothers, Morse, and Whitney made big

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Celebrating Software Freedom Day: Check out some newly emancipated AI Java example code

An objection I’ve had to many programming books and web sites is that they don’t make sample code available under a free software license. This is within the rights of the author, of course, but it seems counter to the spirit of teaching and sharing knowledge to restrict the use of example code.

A writer of instructional material may be doing so to earn some money, but I hope he or she is also motivated by the desire to help others. I think the best authors and teachers are motivated strongly by this desire. And if this is the case, I think it reasonably follows that the author of a programming work should want their students to be able to freely use their source code in the students’ own creations.

I was happy to exchange words recently with an …

A Library is a Vault for Locking Up Books

Apparently.

U’S DEAL WITH GOOGLE

Disrespect for property

If I were to walk into a photocopy shop and ask for a duplicate of a copyright-protected book, the shop workers would show me the door. It does not matter whether I intended to distribute snippets of the text around the world or do anything else with the copy — the courts have ruled that the unlicensed duplication of an in-copyright book is illegal.

But when the University of Minnesota announces plans to digitally duplicate books, including copyright-protected works, in a commercial project with Internet giant Google (Star Tribune, June 7), it calls the effort groundbreaking and valuable.

As an author who teaches at the University of Minnesota, I wonder how I will talk to students about academic honesty and integrity when the university

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