He is just starting his ways in the Citadel (a large set of buildings that contain many guilds). The Citadel is located in a big city surrounded with a great black wall. During reading the novel we will learn more about this city and the world where it is situated. The story starts like a normal fantasy but as we read more it occurs that there are some advanced technologies in it but people mostly forgot how to use them so it still feels like fantasy. More over the world is like our Earth in few hundreds of thousand years in the future when the Sun will start dying and the world will be a lot colder.

Alright, enough about the plot, time take a look at disadvantages. The writing style of Gene Wolfe is pretty stiff the only thing that pushed me further was curiosity about the world and why it turned away from the technology. The characters act in completely unpredictable way and more importantly they have no depth. Story is also very short I would expect more of it even in so few pages.

I don’t recommend this book. I myself would read the following parts only because I am interested in the world and not in the main character or plot. You should check others comments on amazon page below, I saw that most people liked this book so you might check it out if you want.

Rating 3/10

Read comments (or buy if you like) The Shadow of the Torturer

We meet the first main character during his theft of a horse that was to be burned in an Erling leaders funeral. The next person that we will watch closely in this novel is Cyngael prince which seeks revenge (I can’t say more). There are even more characters and it’s hard to tell which is more or less important. But definitely the most interesting of all of them is king of Anglcyns, who is base on Alfred the Great. As usual in Kays recent books there are many side stories picturing the lives of simple people and how they are affected by major events that happen around them.

What’s different in this book is that there are fantasy characters (mostly ones based on Elfs) appearing very often and they play a key role in the plot. The final scenes aren’t maybe as dramatic as in The Lions of Al-Rassan or Tigana but are nicely shown.

Overall The Last Light of the Sun is a much better accomplishment than The Lions of Al-Rassan, the story is more entertaining and actions forced me to read longer and longer. Although it’s far from the Sarantine Mozaic (Sailing to Sarantium (Sarantine Mosaic, Book 1), Lord of Emperors (Sarantine Mosaic, Book 2)) series. Once more I was so much interested in the nations presented that I just had to read some more info on the early days of England and Alfred the Great. Book that succeeds in entertaining and keeping the reader interested even after reading the book is worth buying.

Rating 8/10

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It’s not the first time when Guy Gavriel Kay takes the reader on a journey to an alternative world which, with few exceptions (two moons, somehow changed coastlines, slightly different gods) resembles ours. This time we are presented with a history of conflict between two religions (with a drop of third one) that happens on peninsula of Al-Rassan.

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This piece of land is divided between three small Jaddite kindgoms in the north and remains of Al-Rassan khalifat in the south. The main characters in this book are a cavalry commander from a Jaddit north, a Asharite warrior-poet from the south and a Kindath women that is a physician. The storyline of the book can be splited to two plots one of them is love story between Jehane (the Kindath) and the two warriors. The second plot presents the Jaddit-Asharine conflict.

That’s it for the plot but what about readability ? Well it’s not as good as in other Kays books. While reading this one I was constantly waiting for something interesting to happen and eventually I was disappointed. The characters are interesting but fail to involve the reader emotionally. It’s not like in Tigana or Sarantine Mozaic (Sailing to Sarantium (Sarantine Mosaic, Book 1), Lord of Emperors (Sarantine Mosaic, Book 2)), in those books I was really scared when characters were close to death. Also the ending isn’t very surprising. But although above mentioned disadvantages the book forced me to research the history early medieval Spain, and I encourage you to do the same, a very interesting read.

So would I recommend to read this book? If you like to read about religious conflicts or like medieval history then yes. On the other hand if you prefer to be entertained by this book then I would recommend to skip The Lions of Al-Rassan and read other Guy Gavriel Kays books first and after that you can go back to this one, at least to have a good knowledge of the world that connects Sarantine Mozaic, The Last Light of the Sun and The Lions of Al-Rassan.

Rating 6/10

Buy (or just check comments) for The Lions of al-Rassan

The book starts with a short summary of all Sun Certification exams with a more detailed explanation of the Sun Certified Programmer Exam. Besides those reviews, first chapter shows how to study for the exam in an efficient way.

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The rest of the book is filed with information essential for passing the exam. More over, the content is very useful in a day to day Java and its library knowledge. For example, I don’t know how about you but I didn’t have a clue that there is an Arrays class with quite a few methods helping with array types.

The text itself is well structured, information the reader should read more carefully is shown in boxes called Exam Watch. There are also similar paragraphs/boxes with text not related to the exam (called on the job).

Furthermore, every chapter ends with a summary of the study material, followed by a 2 minute drill which is a big help when you gave the exam in few hours and want to recall the material quickly. Finally, every chapter has a 10 to 20 exam questions with detailed answers. This test has similar difficulty level as the real one so you can test yourself with real life exam questions regarding the chapter that was just read. And if you thought that its enough, you get a CD with two mock exams (lasting 2 hours, the test software gives a feel of the exam structure) to test your skills even more.

What about the writing style of authors ? It’s superb! When there is a difficult subject Kathy and Bert insert a hilarious text and everything starts to look brighter Even without the witty jokes, Java language specifics are very clearly explained.

Suming it all up, this book is (in my opinion of course) a must have for every serious Java programmer even if one doesn’t wan’t to take the SCJP exam, it deciphers some Java inner workings. And as for the exam, by studying from the previous book for the 1.4 exam I managed to get a high score (only 2 missed answers), so I think it’s a good recommendation

Rating 9/10

Buy (or just look at amazon comments) SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide (Exam 310-055) (Certification Press Study Guides)

Usually most computer programming related books contain a language course or an API specification/description, sometimes algorithms. As a result computer industry lacks books dealing with software development in general, telling how to “do it” not in a specific language, but in a broader aspect. “The Pragmatic Programmer” is different, gives a more general view on the subject of programming, as such it is much more valuable than any book talking about specifics of a language or operating system internals.

First part of the book presents the main philosophy behind the pragmatic programmer, like taking care of a program, don’t let it deteriorate, being the catalyst of changes, looking at the big picture (not only at the details). More over a pragmatic programmer should communicate with users on their requirements, make quality one of its requirements. There is a very good section about knowledge and how to increase it, by buying diverse books regularly, , reading them with a critical eye, and even where you can learn (e.g. a bus stop, waiting in a queue to the doctor). There is also emphasis on communication, like knowing your listeners, creating appropriate documents, or even how your email should look like.

Following chapter introduces the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, and presents why usually the code looks like copy-pasted, and connected with it orthogonality (keep unrelated objects loose). There is also a very enlightening section about tracer bullets and building prototypes, this way the user can see earlier what is being done, and programmer can see how complicated a certain problem really is. And near the end we have a discussion about domain languages (this was a very entertaining topic for me) and estimations.Third chapter talks about programming tools, here we have a subsection about shells, giving the most out of your editor/IDE, and source code control (believe it or not, there are still workplaces that don’t use any kind of version control). In this chapter we have very helpful paragraph about talking to a duck, when you have an “unsolvable” problem, go and try to tell about it to a bubble duck, or other plastic pet, you will see how everything starts to clear out when you start to verbalize your problem.

Next chapter presents design by contract, and does it in such a good way that I started to learn Eiffel (the original design by contract language). Rest of the chapter deals with various error handling and prevention like sopping the program if it goes wrong, programming using assertions and exceptions, resource allocation balance.

Fifth chapter gives a presentation of elastic programming, how to help your program adapt to new situations. First we have a law of Demeter (keeping the minimal amount of bindings), than there is a section about meta programming, that is making the code highly configurable (e.g. allowing to change the algorithm, by changing a config file entry) keeping the generals in the code and specifics in the meta data. This last section is very interesting and I highly recommend studying it. In the same chapter authors introduce separating logic from the view and introduce Model View Controller pattern. As a last section of this chapter we have a short introduction to shared array systems (like JavaSpaces or T Spaces).

Chapter six starts with a critique of random programming, and how to program more reasonably. Following there is a section about estimation of algorithms, refactoring, unit testing (you might want to check out Test Driven Development book review for an interesting technique based on unit testing).

Next chapter deals with the “things” that you have to do before starting coding, like requirements gathering and how not to fall in the specification trap, at the end, there is a discussion of pitfalls in formal processes and methodologies.

Last chapter takes on the subject of team projects, how to bring together pragmatism and teamwork, very crucial in teams is automatization of repetitive tasks, like installing plugins to IDE or adding a header comment to all source files.

Besides the pure content, book is filled with exercises and homeworks, which increase understanding of the problem in the section, in the appendix there is a list of books and magazines that programmers should look into.

“The Pragmatic Programmer” is one of the two books on the market that take programming from this general perspective, the second one is “Code Complete” (book review), but both books do it in different way. The former gives a small article like sections with a more flexible content (and lesser number of pages), and the latter is more formal (with almost overwhelming 900 big pages). Both take a distinct way and discuss somehow different subjects, and you should read them in any order. I highly recommend “The Pragmatic Programmer” to be on the bookshelf of every programmer.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Buy now The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

Introductory chapters present how software should be constructed, how important is to have upstream prerequisites.

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Moreover there are tables that help you choose how should all your software development phases look like (e.g. no code inspections or formal code inspections) based on a kind of software that is being created. The reader is guided along problem definition, requirements and architecture prerequisites.

After that, there are the main construction processed presented : detailed design and coding. There are chapters about good class designs, routine (function or procedure) construction. One of the most interesting chapters is the one about Pseudocode Programming Process, a very good read, and makes you wonder why haven’t I tried that before.

Chapters that follow give a more detailed view of coding, how to write control statements and loops. There is also a chapter about table driven routines, I must say that’s the first time I read about them.

After the coding parts, the book presents processes that are near the coding phase like quality assurance and how it can reduce the cost of project (and even the development time!). Following is a discussion of Inspections and pair programming or as the author calls them Collaborative Development. This chapter gives ans answer why to inspect/pair program the code. Next are chapters about testing tips, how to debug and refactor code. Code tuning strategies and techniques are also presented. Further more McConnel discusses how to manage construction and integration, followed by the selection of good programming tools.

The last part is about craftsmanship, how to increase your programming abilities, like developing self-commenting code.

Almost every chapter in the book ends with a checklist that should help to include the material presented to the readers programming toolbox. Chapters contain some amount of hard data from the industry statistics, to help you understand how important a certain topic is. Also a big plus goes to McConnel for “key points” at the and of each chapter, it really helps to review the material that was read.

Overall, the book is a must buy for every programmer who thinks seriously about his job. Surely it’s quite a big read, but knowledge that can be obtained from this book is almost overwhelming. I recommend also to check “The Pragmatic Programmer” as it complements “Code Complete”. You might also check out Test Driven Development for other interesting design subjects.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Buy now the Code Complete, Second Edition

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Daniels father, a successful merchant and smuggler, is a leader of Puritan movement in England, as a result Daniel is sometimes stigmatized by mostly anglican or catholic surrounding. Nevertheless he continues his studies on Cambridge, and helping in Newton’s own research. During the course of years, more knows characters appear in Waterhouse life, like Robert Hook, which was the Curator of Experiments in Royal Society. We can see how Hook conducts his experiments, while Daniel and others help him in his efforts.

It is interesting to see how natural philosophs lived and how their inventions were born, even if it is mostly based on Stephensons assumptions and sources which he mentions at the beginning of this book. There are some quite drastic scenes presented, when Hook and his colleagues perform operation on living dog, they want to see how do the living creatures breath.

Apart from the early scientists (or natural philosophs, as they were called at that time), there is a really vivid portrait of 18th century London and people that lived in it. The great cataclysms that struck London (The Great Fire and the Great Plague) are shortly presented from the point of view of richer part of London’s inhabitants.

Moreover there are numerous philosophical disputes that Daniel conducts, either in his mind or with other natural philosophs e.g. discussion with Leibniz, when they try to define life, and if a machine can think.

Now, to the summary, fist book of the Baroque Cycle gives a very good impression. It is written in a style that forces the reader to read more and more. I look forward to read the next two books from this series (or trilogy) that Neal Stephensons has already published.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Buy (hardcover) Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)

Buy (paperback) Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)

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The next part, shows how to develop a testing framework (xUnit) by testing it first with a previous version of the same testing framework. It is an interesting approach, but somehow, it was not as interesting as the first example, maybe it was to abstract for me. This time the examples are written in Python.

And now for the real interesting part - the last part. This one consists test-driven patterns, such as red/green bar patterns, implementing design patterns etc. If you are not new to this kind of development, this part will be the most beneficial to you.

“Test-Driven Development” is well written, with a lot of humor, if you read any book by Kent Beck than you probably know this writing style. Each steps in the examples is thoroughly explained and really should make you think about giving this kind of development a try in the next project. Moreover if you know something or even develop your software this way, then the third part will show you how you could improve your techniques. The only drawback of the book is its length, it is too short. My recommendation is: buy it!.

Rating: 7 out of 10

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During the following years more and more such memorials appear around Asia, all of them talking about the same mysterious Kuin. When the monuments erects it destroys everything in its vicinity, and as a byproduct, very dramatically reduces temperature in its surroundings. It results in even more damage as freezing water blows up containers, pipes, cars. Governments start science projects to gain more knowledge about strange structures and a way to stop Kuin.

This nominated to Hugo awards novel is an example of science-fiction book with future paradoxes. By sending monuments to the past, Kuin creates himself and his followers, as a result he gains knowledge how to create monuments that appear in the past. The book is written in a form of Scott’s diary, so we can see how his life is affected by this strange invasion from the future. In the beginning he is fascinated with Kuin’s blue blocks, but as more of the appear, and more people turn into Kuin’s followers, his fascination fades. He looses job, and starts to work for a scientest which wants to top Kuin.

“The Chronoliths” has a well developed characters with interesting backgrounds (e.g. Scott’s boss is a lesbian, despite that her assistant is in love with her).

The ending is somehow disappointing, we aren’t told who is Kuin, there are only some hints but the true identity is hidden. There is an interesting explanation of the way the time is affected by Kuin. It is explained as a result of strange tau radiation that makes people do what they have to (e.g. monuments have to appear), people that are near the memorials during their landing are connected with those blocks in a way that’s not so clear.

Robert Charles Wilson’s novel gives a good and interesting view on how the future might influence the present. Also, diary form is not common in science-fiction literature and should be promoted more (it shows more emotions of the main characters than a third person perspective).

It is the first book of this author that I have read, but it definitely encouraged me to seek out more of his novels.

Rating: 7 out of 10

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