Reading log

[ajyouthguy]

Going All the Way: Preparing for a Marriage That Lasts--Craig Groeschel

awesome book that is gonna be what I use in premarital counseling for the foreseeable future.

[ajyouthguy]

just finished these two the past two days:

Jesus Wants to Save Christians--Rob Bell and Don Golden
The Stuff Christians Like--Jonathan Acuff

[RedcoatJones]

just finished these two the past two days:

Jesus Wants to Save Christians--Rob Bell and Don Golden
The Stuff Christians Like--Jonathan Acuff

I love Acuff's blog. How is the book?

[ajyouthguy]

it is excellent...i laughed, hard, a lot, partly because it was funny period, but mostly b/c you find yourself realizing how many of those things YOU, people you know, your church, etc, have done/said/etc.

[ajyouthguy]

finished The Christian Atheist by Craig Groeschel (excellent) and The Most Loving Place in Town: A Parable for the Modern Church by Ken Blanchard and Phil Hodges (very good too)

[ajyouthguy]

Stripped: Uncensored Grace on the Streets of Vegas--Jud Wilhite

[ajyouthguy]

read:
Lose Your Cool by Zach Hunter (Thursday)
Refuel by Doug Fields (Friday)
Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore (Saturday)

[NewDimension]

A Brief History of Everything - Ken Wilber

[ajyouthguy]

The Justice God is Seeking--David Ruis

[ajyouthguy]

It by Craig Groeschel

[ajyouthguy]

Beyond Charity: The Call to Christian Community Development by John M. Perkins

[NewDimension]

Walden - Henry D. Thoreau

[ajyouthguy]

Lead Like Jesus--Ken Blanchard

[ajyouthguy]

Start Here: Doing Hard Things Where You Are--Alex and Brett Harris

[ajyouthguy]

Plan B by Pete Wilson

[RedcoatJones]

Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, by Brad Gooch.

Very good bio of a "Christ-haunted" writer. I remember liking her stories in school, but now I'm inspired to go read some more, especially Wise Blood and the short story collections.

[ajyouthguy]

We Get to Carry Each Other: The Gospel According to U2--Greg Garrett
The Story Behind Every U2 Song--Neill Stokes

[ajyouthguy]

Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream by David Platt

[ajyouthguy]

And: The Gathered and Scattered Church by Hugh Halter and Matt Shmay

[ajyouthguy]

Transformational Church by Ed Stetzer and Thom Rainer

[ajyouthguy]

Viral Churches--Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird

[Vlad!]

Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft, G. Pascal Zachary
I read this book partly due to an interest in the history of computer programming and partly because I strongly suspected I would see some similarities between the events it describes and the events going on in my job as we race to complete the multi-year development cycle on a new operating system.

Overall, I think Zachary does a good job of chronicling the events in a way that the layperson will easily be able to follow, while not getting bogged down explaining every little thing and making the narrative tedious for the experienced developer. The story the book tells is one I found to be fascinating; though I thought I knew much of the sordid history of Windows, it has both a depth and a breadth far beyond my own knowledge.

Not being a historian, I'm not sure I'm qualified to comment on his methodology, but I will say that he appears to have gleaned the majority of his material through personal interviews. He interviewed a lot of people, but I know if several years later some guy came to me to ask me about the project I was doing, my story would no doubt be an exaggerated caricature of actual events: small slights would be amplified into major grievances, small triumphs of my own would be trumpeted as major coups, and events would no doubt be twisted in a way which suggests I was much more of the lynchpin of my team than I actually am. Perhaps Zachary has found ways to ameliorate this.

In any case, I really enjoyed the book, and for anyone interested in the history of the operating system most people use every day I think it would be an extremely enlightening read. It's very well-written, reads very easily, and is certainly worth your time and attention.

[Vlad!]

Consider the Lobster (and Other Essays), David Foster Wallace
I'd been meaning to check out some DFW stuff for some time, and I had this book sitting on my reading table for an honestly embarrassing number of months.

Wallace is truly an incredible essayist, and it's a joy to observe such a skilled writer practicing his craft. Whether it's talk radio, the boiling of the titular lobster, politics, or even pornography, DFW waxes eloquent on many subjects. Though I don't necessarily agree with all his opinions, I certainly enjoy the way he presents them.

One criticism of this collection, and in particular of his piece on contemporary usage, is that he has a tendency toward the prolix which can make an otherwise entertaining essay drag on. I certainly recognize the irony here; I, of all people. criticizing a better writer than I for going on too long about something, especially a topic like nitpicking modern grammar.

I was very much entertained by his piece Host, about talk radio; not only was it supremely interesting in itself, but he experimented with a new kind of typesetting for footnotes which wound up working quite well. For those unfamiliar with his writing, DFW loves footnotes, and even his normal pieces present a challenge to typesetters in that his footnotes will sometimes wrap to the next page, or indeed have footnotes of their own! As I myself am quite fond of the footnote, I've devoted the occasional synapse toward thinking about how footnotes could be improved, especially in the context of web media. I think something similar to Wallace's approach would work fairly well in hypertext.

I certainly plan on reading more DFW at some point; perhaps I'll sample some of his fiction next.

[Vlad!]

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, David Foster Wallace.

This honestly isn't the next thing I've read since July, I just keep forgetting to post things here.

DFW was at his best when doing the sort of "investigative journalism" schtick he did between gigs of doing what he really enjoyed, which was writing fiction and/or waxing prolix on linguistics (he also taught English at the community college level, I think), and ASFTINDA is definitely full of that. The titular essay is a reporting of a 7-night cruise he embarked on; a cushy assignment he received, I believe, on the merits of an essay he did a couple of years earlier for the same magazine entitled "Getting Away From Pretty Much Being Away From It All", where he details his experiences at the Illinois State Fair. The essay "Host", which I praised above, was along a similar vein.

As with Consider the Lobster, the collection also contains its share of long discourses on topics which may or may not hold your attention. I found myself thumbing through the latter parts of "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley", and I must confess to skipping completely over most of "Greatly Exaggerated". This, however, is one reason why I am a fan of the short story collection (or, as in this case with nonfiction, the essay collection): if I don't like something, I can skip forward without feeling as though I've missed a critical stepping stone.

Ultimately, I believe this book is worth a read; while each essay therein may not hold your interest, there is likely at least something there for you, and if you happen to like tennis, independent film, or the works of H.L. Hix and Roland Barthes, you will possibly even find some gems which are right up your alley.

[bloop]

I've been reading American lit. that my English teachers didn't make me read in high school. I read The Catcher in the Rye and I'm in the middle of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn right now. It's all a lot better when there isn't a grade to worry about.

[Vlad!]

I read The Catcher in the Rye on my own in college because we didn't read it in school. I honestly didn't like it much at all. I actually liked, or at least appreciated, a decent number of the books we read for school, though definitely not all.

[bloop]

I alternated between thinking Holden's cynical, caustic nature was pretty funny, and just wishing he would grow up. I liked the book, though. Finn is a good read so far, but I have to read half of it twice to understand it, particularly when Jim says anything.

[Vlad!]

The key with Jim is to say his lines out loud exactly how they're written. Once I learned that his dialog made so much more sense.

(I had read Tom Sawyer before Huckleberry Finn, and the difference is like the difference between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. One is a fun little adventure story, and one is a freaking epic journey full of intense stuff going down. It was several years ago that I read either one, but I remember them being almost like night and day.)

[bloop]

Yeah, that's probably good advice. I do generally get it my second or third time reading silently, but I guess I can risk looking uneducated in front of my wife. 

[ajyouthguy]

Sole Purpose:Shoes of Hope From the Feet of a Samaritan--Manny Ohonme

[ajyouthguy]

Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers--Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Sun Stand Still--Steven Furtick

[Vlad!]

On the Grid, by Scott Huler

Kids these days. Maybe it's just me cementing my "old man" status, but it seems like as technology increases, so does the up-and-coming generation's indifference to how that technology actually works. Clarke wrote a few stories about a future where the beneficiaries of technology had ceased to understand how that technology worked since it maintained itself. Maybe that future is optimistic rather than pessimistic; it seems increasingly likely that we will reach the pinnacle of ignorance before we reach the pinnacle of technology, leaving the latter to come crashing down around our ears.

In any case, Huler's book does an admirable job at dispelling this ignorance with simple prose and plenty of anecdotes and vignettes to weave a narrative as well as teach a concept. From the water system to the electrical system to the collection of garbage and bio waste, each chapter dissects a critical part of our infrastructure and breaks it down to the basics.

What I like best about this book is that Huler excels at giving just the right amount of information. I don't feel like I know enough to run a sanitary landfill or a water plant, but I do know enough to have an opinion on each, and more importantly I have a clearer understanding of the effects my decisions have on these things. Though he spends plenty of time talking about each system in the abstract, each chapter narrows its focus until each broad topic is distilled to the level of the individual.

A pleasant personal touch--which I actually didn't realize before starting the book--is that Huler lives right here in Raleigh. Thus, when he's explaining the systems, much of the time he is using as an example the very systems I interact with each day.

Not only do I think adults should read this book, I think it should be required reading in schools, possibly around the seventh or eighth grade. Not that I think it will magically transform kids into civic-minded individuals, but it demonstrates at a practical level three very important facts:
* The systems we depend on every day are not magic
* The actions we take as individuals make a difference
* We should have opinions on these systems and actions because infrastructure matters

I would consider it a victory if the upcoming generation managed to internalize even one of those lessons.

[ajyouthguy]

The Next Christians by Gabe Lyons

[Vlad!]

Badass: A Relentless Onslaught of the Toughest Warlords, Vikings, Samurai, Pirates, Gunfighters, and Military Commanders to Ever Live, by Ben Thompson

Ben clearly needs to write under a pseudonym; a book with a title as epic as this one should be written by Oleg Svenson or Gritty McPunchyourface or something like that. How can one expect to be an epic badass with a name as pedestrian as Ben Thompson?

In any case, this book is pure junk food from start to finish. Each chapter is filled with breathless hyperbole and reckless exaggeration; it may in fact be fair to say that Badass is to history what Mythbusters is to science. Perhaps this is a personal failing on my part, but I don't believe I learned anything from this book, except perhaps a couple of new slang words for 'testicles'. However, I laughed a lot and it served the purpose of providing something relatively mindless to read over Thanksgiving (yes, I am really bad about writing Reading Log entries the same month that I actually read the book).

Fortunately, the book does not in any way bill itself as a serious historical work. Not that it is completely devoid of historical worth--if nothing else, the bibliography in the back might provide a useful starting point--but I recommend approaching it purely for its entertainment value. So long as you have a high tolerance for vulgar humor, that value is quite high.

[Vlad!]

Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel

One part hero worship, one part inspiration, and one part information - that's the recipe that went into this book.

This book is nothing more or less than a series of interviews with great minds in computer science. From developers who got rich and/or famous in the wild early days of the World Wide Web like Netscape's Jamie Zawinski or Mozilla's Brendan Eich to impressively-bearded systems hackers like Ken Thompson to the venerable academics like Don Knuth, Seibel asks some of the questions I would want to ask if I had a chance to sit down with some of these greats.

I wish all computer science students had to read this book. Passion and a love of learning oozes from the pores of these luminaries, but though that was certainly very inspiring to me, it's their humanity which really stands out. You can tell which ones are posing and which are unassuming and unaffected. The gentle humility shown by the older interviewees stands in contrast to the hubris or rough exteriors of the younger ones. The perspective offered by jwz, who quit engineering to become a nightclub owner, or Bernie Cosell, who now owns a sheep farm out in the sticks, is much different from that of Ken Thompson or Peter Norvig who work at Google. But even so, there are some big-picture items that I really feel like our industry could learn from.

I'm not sure that anyone without an interest in computer science would get a lot out of this book. There are some parts--the value (or lack thereof) of a formal education, the importance of passion, the relationships and stories--which I think are of much more universal interest, but I suspect that the non-programmer would get too bogged down with the technical questions. The questions are clearly delineated in the text, though, and anyone who feels comfortable skipping over parts they don't care about and dealing with the fact that some of the more interesting answers may be peppered with details to be glossed over might enjoy getting it from the library and browsing through it.

[ajyouthguy]

Gazelles, Baby Steps and 37 Other Things Dave Ramsey Taught Me About Debt--Jon Acuff

[ajyouthguy]

Church in the Making--Ben Arment
Generation Ex-Christian--Drew Dyck

[ajyouthguy]

Church Planter: The Man, the Message, the Mission--Darrin Patrick

[Vlad!]

The Design of Everyday Things - Donald Norman

Paul Graham once wrote that "the greatest advantage of a PhD (besides being the union card of academia, of course) may be that it gives you some baseline confidence. For example, the Honeywell thermostats in my house have the most atrocious UI. My mother, who has the same model, diligently spent a day reading the user's manual to learn how to operate hers. She assumed the problem was with her. But I can think to myself 'If someone with a PhD in computer science can't understand this thermostat, it must be badly designed.'"

This is, essentially, Norman's thesis in DoET. He analyzes, from both a cognitive psychology and a usability engineering perspective, our interaction with the objects and artifacts in our life. He doesn't spend much time discussing the usability of computer systems, which is quite good because it means that this book, which would otherwise probably be quite dated, is in fact still incredibly relevant.

The depressing thing about this book, really, is that in the decades since it was written things have not significantly improved. The buttons on the steering wheel of my 2011 model car suffer from the exact same usability defect he described in an ancient slide projector he once used in a classroom.

I feel like every single person ought to read this book. Designers and engineers need to read it because it's important that the people making the products understand how to make them usable. Consumers need to read it to understand the importance of voting with their dollar. And everyday people need to read it to understand that the problem isn't with them, it's with the defective and frankly somewhat offensive design of the things they're trying to use.

I have had many experiences like the one Paul Graham describes in the quote above. I remember one time I was helping my uncle take some photographs from his camera, crop them, and then print them out so my aunt could turn them into greeting cards. He was clearly struggling at the task, and I commented that the user interface of the proprietary Kodak software was remarkably bad, and he said "I think the user is remarkably bad as well". I wanted to yell "no! no!". That an intelligent person would assume the problem lies with himself rather than the product shows a faith in the technology that honestly most technology does not deserve. One of the clear messages of this book is that these companies are emphatically not infallible and in many cases really have no idea what they're doing when it comes to design.

(Obligatory webcomic link)

[Vlad!]

Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook - Michael Lopp

Unlike many self-styled career gurus, Michael Lopp--better known in most circles as Rands from Rands in Repose--has the cred to back his advice. He still works as an engineering manager, writing books (of which this is his second) and weblog posts in his free time. He gives great advice on how to manage your career, your manager, and your day-to-day life in the trenches.

The one real criticism I have about this book is that, like its author, it is fully steeped in the Silicon Valley culture. I personally don't think it's weird to work the same gig for more than five years, and if asked to work a 60-hour week, I will refuse. However, much like most of this book's advice, you can take it or leave it without affecting the other bits.

Overall, lots of valuable advice and stories from the trenches. Not sure how well it applies to other areas, but certainly worth a read for software engineers.