The idea of making a real historical figure the detective in a historical mystery is not unique (arguably Philip Kerr makes an even better choice with Isaac Newton in Dark Matter) but it is very effective. We know these characters had considerable intellect, the right political connections to advance investigations, and were in interesting places at interesting times.

However unlike Kerr’s Newton, Leoni’s Dante is initially very ill-prepared for his task, and is annoyingly gullible until right at the end of the tale. Given that this is his fourth outing in such a role, you’d think he’d be getting a bit better at it! The novel also struck me as very similar to S J Parris’ tales featuring Giordano Bruno, but with the difference that at least Dante does at least realise the truth for himself, albeit right at the end.

The story is well written, with action which advances very steadily and got me involved quite quickly. There’s a distinctly Italian focus on the political relationships between the players, but Leoni avoids the mistake of creating a cast of thousands, and focuses on a relatively small group of core characters. The very distinctive writing style is usually easy to read – whether this is the author’s skill or the translator’s is not clear, and arguably unimportant. There are occasional wordy patches, especially when trying to describe Dante’s state of mind or his ideas about his poetry, but these give way fairly quickly to the main action.

The book creates a brilliant depiction of mediaeval Rome, complete with crumbling Roman buildings not yet supplemented by Renaissance replacements, complex power politics and downtrodden lower orders of society. However, I did find the repetitive details of the routes around Rome, described without benefit of a map or some sort of overview, a bit hard to follow. Fortunately it’s not critical to do so for the plot. On a lighter note, I now understand the inspiration for Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork…

The fact that this book is fourth in a series doesn’t seem to be a barrier to reading it first, as the small amount of necessary background is simply explained at the right time. However, as noted, you do wonder how much practice Dante needs to get any good at detection.

This book is not a “light”read, but rewards the reader with a rich, captivating tale well worth the effort.

On the upside, however, Morey has done a fine job of creating a compelling and highly amusing story which rips along at a great pace, from the first evil practical joke to the final complicated dénouement. The plot, although relatively simple, winds and unwinds steadily and you won’t want to put the book down once engaged. Although the overall outcome is never really in doubt, there are enough surprises in respect of which characters receive satisfaction, which rehabituation and which a well-deserved sticky end.

The best writing of this style has me laughing out loud, whether in company or not. This didn’t quite achieve those heights, being read with more of a constant wry grin. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read and I’m happy to recommend it, but here’s hoping the author’s next novel will be even better.

The concept is simple: Chad Orzel’s dog, Emmy, may be a typical mutt obsessed with walks, squirrels and discarded food, but she’s also intelligent enough to have a basic grasp of quantum concepts, and a view to how they might be exploited in her favour, for example by passing simultaneously around both sides of a tree to catch a squirrel. Each chapter starts with Chad explaining why “it’s not quite like that”, and going on to explain the real physics to her in some detail. This works well, breaking up some quite complex discussions with amusing dialogue between master and hound, and makes the book eminently readable.

The books scores because it’s bang up to date, and goes beyond the basic quantum concepts into more complex areas like decoherence, entanglement and quantum teleportation, supplementing explanations of the basic concepts and “thought experiments” with the details and outcomes of relatively recent experimental verification. Similarly “quantum” is the current buzzword beloved of pseudo-scientific charlatans, and the last chapter is a timely effort to debunk those who abuse it for get-rich-quick schemes and medical quackery.

I also particularly liked the way that the author is not afraid to embrace the concepts of measurement errors and accuracy. These are vital tools to understand how well, or badly, something has been established, and I was very pleased to see such an accessible book using them well.

The explanations themselves are a mixed bunch, some being very complicated and taking me a couple of goes to read and absorb. Given that I probably have rather more background that the target demographic (I do have a good Physics degree, albeit a few years old) this may mean that some readers could struggle with the most complex parts. I suspect a few more diagrams in these areas might have helped. However overall the book succeeds, and will probably prompt keen readers to re-read or seek out secondary explanations where they don’t understand first time.

In the Kindle edition some of the graphics are a page or two adrift of the relevant text, and the footnotes (which often contain important or amusing asides) are presented in a bunch at the end of each chapter, which is not very reader friendly. I suspect the paper version of the book is better in this respect.

This books is well worth reading, and has certainly helped to refresh and update my understanding of a complex field, while giving me a welcome laugh at the dog’s antics. I look forward to reading the relativity volume later this year.

At the core is the old idea that the achievements of the ancient Egyptian 4th Dynasty were created by and for visiting aliens, and that much of Egyptian mythology stems from that encounter. However, unlike the disappointing, distorted and disingenuous pseudo-science of Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock this book just sets out to spin a great yarn, and succeeds admirably.

The author paints on a grand canvas, covering three worlds and five millennia, but keeps the story at a human level, by focusing on a number of well-developed central characters: be they good, evil or simply misguided. While throughout the book historical and current stories proceed in parallel, a believable contextual and technical explanation is developed for their linkage.

The science is clever, focusing mainly on the achievements of one of the races who have developed technology several hundred years beyond ours, but based almost entirely on organic solutions. Interstellar travel is handled realistically, with sub-light journeys based on long periods of hibernation, and the quest to recover a lost faster-than-light solution a key part of the plot. However, at no time does the science dominate or become superfluous to the plot.

I had a few minor niggles: The cover notes don’t do the story justice, and won’t help sales. The character, race and place names are arguably too Americanised and insufficiently “alien”. Also my pre-release copy of the book contained a number of odd spelling errors, which suggested that it had been typed without the benefit of a spell checker. However, these are very minor complaints about a very good book.

I enjoyed this thoroughly, and it’s restored my faith that it is still possible to write new science fiction work which bears inspection against the old masters. Highly recommended.

On the face of it, this is a  classic Pitt story: maritime mysteries, strong male and female characters, the gradual disrobing of byzantine plots, heinous villainy committed mainly by an evil family firm, and the side of right held up by Pitt, his NUMA colleagues, and a handful of other worthies. At the climax Pitt and Giodano ride to the rescue against a heavily armed force of Korean villains, who have just destroyed a SEAL taskforce, transported on a confederate paddle-steamer! The book’s a real page-turner, and you won’t want to put it down.

But maybe the most interesting facet of this book, and why I’ve decided it deserves a review, is as a historical snapshot of the world and America’s assessment of it. Some authors deal with contemporary issues and seem to have a remarkable ability to predict real events. Others, Cussler usually among them, avoid the current in order to avoid becoming “dated”. Unusually in this book he’s tried to paint a picture of the near future, and it’s interesting to see what he got right, and what wrong.

The main villains (who have their offices on the 100th floor of the World Trade Centre – some things no-one could have predicted) are motivated mainly by money. The other evil force is a very cold war Soviet Union leadership, even though the cracks were starting to appear by 1984, and in reality by 1989 it was all over bar the shouting.  Mere “terrorists” are despatched as possible players early on by the rather dismissive statement “[it’s] Too elaborate. This operation took an immense amount of planning and money. The ingenuity is incredible. It goes far beyond the capabilities of any terrorist organisation.”

Remarkably Cussler does predict a middle eastern war triggered by an invasion of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but he has it happening in 1985, by Iran. However as a counterpoint, at one point the idea of American forces ever fighting in Afghanistan is treated as an example of the impossible. How times change.

The book is a revealing period piece, and interesting for the references which have been overtaken by history. Ultimately, however, it’s a good story and deserves to be read in the spirit in which it was written. Do so and you won’t be disappointed.

A sequence of short chapters each explores a topic, usually identifying a stream of words stemming from a common source, whether that be a Greek, Latin or proto-Indo-European root, a language which has been partially adopted into the English tapestry, or a fount of linguistic innovation such as the writings of Milton. In many cases he threads a route through time, geography and lexical space to words which have dramatically different or even opposite meanings to their antecedents.

While each chapter can be read alone, Forsyth cunningly links them together, with each feeding the next, and the last linking back to the first like Ouroboros swallowing its tail.

The writing is always amusing, and occasionally funny enough to stimulate a laugh out loud. Forsyth reserves particular cruelty for poets, and other specialists in the use and abuse of words. My favourite quote: “[we] should devote a chapter to Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. So we won’t.” Myles Coverdale, editor of an early English Bible, is characterised by “[he] didn’t let the tiny detail that he knew no Latin, Greek or Hebrew get in his way. This is the kind of can-do attitude that is sadly lacking in modern biblical scholarship.”

This isn’t a learned book, and its structure and style preclude any deep exploration of a particular topic. But it will convey a broad appreciation of the mixing of the rich Jambalaya which is the English language, and will certainly pique your interest at understanding where words come from, as well as their immediate meaning.

The first third of the book deals mainly with the evolution and nature of scientific “laws”, and the meaning of reality relative to our various mental models. This is very interesting, but perhaps a little ironic given the authors’ statement on the first page that “philosophy is dead”. What other label should be attributed to this discussion?

The next section explains key aspects of quantum theory, in particular wave/particle duality, probabilistic rather than deterministic behaviour, and the effects of observation on the system. That we can now demonstrate this behaviour for relatively large objects, and affect the observed outcome from behaviour originating some considerable time before the observation, is fascinating.

Since Newton science has developed a series of theories describing the workings of our universe, and has then attempted to combine or extend them to provide an ever more comprehensive description. The next section of the book describes this progression. The descriptions of classical physics, relativity and quantum theory are fine, and don’t suffer too much from relative brevity as the older theories will be broadly familiar to most readers. However the pages on M-theory are really too brief, and don’t adequately explain it. Finishing that section with the fact that M-theory admits 10^500 solutions makes it sound very far from the elegant theories espoused earlier in the book.

The final section of the book attempts to describe and explain some of the most problematical aspects of current cosmology, but in my view doesn’t make a very convincing job of it. Cosmological problems include both the fact that universal expansion is still accelerating, and that our current model requires the young universe to have spontaneously “inflated” from coin-sized to many times galaxy sized in less than a second. Neither of these are well explained by current theories as I understand them, and this book doesn’t bridge the gap. Earlier in the book the authors pooh-pooh theories relying on “then a miracle occurs”, but don’t seem to be proposing something much better.

Instead of proposing a theory which explains the observations, the authors seem to be saying that under M-theory all things are possible, and we choose the set of outcomes which matches our measurements. To my mind this is perilously close to saying “God created the Universe as it is”, even though the authors are at pains to refute precisely that interpretation.

It feels to me that Physics is on a threshold similar to its position in the late 19th Century, where we are creating progressively more arcane versions of existing theories in an attempt to prop them up, but what is really required is fresh new ideas – the 21st Century equivalents of Relativity and Quantum Theory. This book confirms that need, but its suggested resolution does not convince me.

Refreshingly Khoury avoids making his heroes into supermen, but the same is not quite true of his villains, all of whom seem to be well-resourced single-minded psychopaths one step ahead of the good guys. A bit more variety there would also help.

Khoury writes well, much better than Dan Brown or some of his other competitors, and the book never lost my focus or interest. The action is well paced, with occasional explosive sequences of high drama. These feel slightly like the the author has an eye on the future film script, but are plausible and reasonably easy to follow. However as much as the action I enjoyed his observations on the formalisation of Christianity by the Romans under Constantine, and the extension of these ideas into yet more possible roles for the mysterious Knights Templar.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable book, with a bit more depth than some others of its genre. I just hope that the author now has the courage to develop a bit more subject matter variety for his excellent writing.

I knew before going in that the film portrays espionage without action, an “inaction thriller” if you like. What I didn’t expect was that it also lacks humour, intrigue and to a surprisingly large extent, dialogue. So much time is allocated to the menacing glances and thoughtful fiddling that some sections might as well be silent. It’s as if the screenwriters and director got to points where Le Carre was describing characters’ internal thoughts, and decided that we could just be left to guess them.

What this also means is that the film lacks the complex plot twists which one might expect. If the characters don’t engage in conversation, then there’s little opportunity to dissemble. Problems like a damaged log book are resolved by simply finding the man who was on duty and asking him to recount his memories, not by any complex act of detection. When a key character who is supposedly dead resurfaces later in the film, there’s no explanation of the timeline, or how he has just been allowed to go back to his cover job with no explanation of his absence.

While the film has a stellar cast, most are sadly underused. The senior spies other than Smiley and the mole have maybe a few lines each and almost no interactions between each other – completely wasting the talents of some of our most senior actors.

The film is shot in a dull brown monotone, carefully stripped of any variation in colour, or tone, or subject, with the single exception of scenes at a key office party. The colour scheme goes well with an accurate portrayal of the dullness of ordinary lives in the 1970s. There’s one very good sequence where Benedict Cumberbatch has to exploit the weaknesses of the low tech environment to extract a key piece of evidence, but most of the period detail is treated as simple background rather than context, a crucial difference.

A spy film without explosions or chases is one thing, but when there’s no attempt to substitute intricate detection, verbal jousting or witty banter then it rapidly becomes a very dull thing indeed.

A few weeks ago the excellent Page Eight with Bill Nighy and Michael Gambon showed exactly how this sort of thing should be done. This much vaunted “film of the year” fails badly.

Location:Southern Ln,Stratford-Upon-Avon,United Kingdom

However, even had she fulfilled her role, I would probably have come away feeling short-changed. Keeley Hawes was “the draw” on the advertising, with her image alone on all the posters, yet her character was on stage for less than ten minutes in over two hours. The lead role was that of Cleo Singer, played competently and enthusiastically by Jessica Raine, who I can only image is very frustrated at her marginalisation by the bigger name.

To emphasise the insult with injury, I didn’t care much for the play anyway. The plot can be summed up simply: “Frustrated dentist has short affair with air-headed assistant. Various other men try it on with her. Eventually the girl sees sense.”. Lots of angst, and I don’t do angst. Worse, the Depression-era New York setting was completely wasted. There were characters making lots of money, and others not making enough to survive, but this was mere background, like the Manhattan street sounds filtering in through the back window of the stark set.

This play was a wasted opportunity, and a poor use of a big name.

The area of concern, an unfortunate one for an action film, was the fight scenes. The camera was right in with the whirring blades, and this led to two problems. The first, which several reviewers have commented upon, was that it became impossible to follow the sequence of events, or the “big picture” view of the battle’s progress. You just couldn’t work out who had done what to whom. A key Roman character is killed in the final battle, yet neither Frances nor myself could work out when, or at whose hands. This stands in contrast to, say, Ridley Scott’s direction in “Gladiator”, when you are never in doubt about what has happened.

The other problem is more personal, and I don’t know how many people it affects. My brain obviously process visual information quite quickly, and at a certain point the world’s most popular optical illusion breaks down. If, say, a sword scythes across a large cinema screen in less than a second, I see it as a series of distinct jumps as my brain discerns the movement between successive frames. While at one level I follow movement, at another I’m distracted by “spotting the jumps”. This only happens in relatively extreme circumstances, with quick movements across large screens, but it’s consistent under those circumstances.

“The Eagle” is not the only film I’ve recently seen which demonstrated these problems. This excessive closeness to the action seems to be a developing trend. directors and cinematographers need to test their work by seeing whether someone sitting towards the front of a large cinema can follow it. If not, a step back might improve things considerably.

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Location:Bookham Rd,,United Kingdom

Where it differs from Cussler is that most of the protagonists are troubled, damaged people, and Adams takes pains to explain their state of mind and how they arrived there. This makes a refreshing change from the two dimensional “supermen” heroes too common nowadays, but takes a little getting used to in an otherwise quite lightweight yarn.

The novel also has a very refreshing British feel, with several English characters and background elements. In particular the cultural references, banter and even the swearing are distinctly British rather than American, which makes a welcome change!

I liked the structure in which the stories of the central characters progress in parallel with each getting time in each chapter, at least until their paths converge. Coupled with good but eminently readable writing, well paced, it makes the book a real page-turner. Towards the end I found the book impossible to put down, and – I hope this doesn’t give too much away – I loved the final plot twist and uplifting ending.

This is a great yarn. As long as you can treat it on it’s own merits you’ll have an enjoyable read.

The real meat of the tale, however, is an exploration of how religion interacts with science, politics and society, and how religious extremism of any kind can sponsor the very worst in human hatred and violence, just as much as more moderate spirituality can drive good behaviour. For a change the religious extremists are not Muslims, but American extreme right-wing “Christians”, while the moderates are mainly Navajos, both Christians and those who follow the old ways. I haven’t previously seen this portrayed in the same way in other fiction.

Although the story also features key characters speaking to God, and the creation of a new world religion, as this is a Whyman Ford tale everything is eventually resolved without recourse to the supernatural, with most driven by much more human causes.

The story rips along at a good rate, keeping you engaged right to the last. The hard science background is well presented and credible, as are the personalities and actions of the key players. It’s eminently readable, well up to Preston’s usual standard.

I enjoyed this book, and can recommend both it and the others in the series.

In this story the heretical monk, Giordano Bruno, is back at the French Embassy in Elizabethan London, where he is drawn rapidly into both a catholic conspiracy to invade England, and a related murder mystery when two of the queen’s ladies in waiting meet very sticky ends.

The style is very similar to the first book, with Bruno trying to both uncover the truths about the murders, and navigate complex relationships with the other characters. The tale is again told in the first person, but here it makes a bit more sense as you get to understand Bruno’s concerns, guilt and frustrations, and the motivation for some of his deeds.

I loved the period detail, particularly the descriptions of Elizabethan versions of well-known London locations. In this book Parris also makes much more use of actual events and personalities, such as Francis Walsingham, William Cecil and John Dee. I could almost hear some of the dialogue being spoken by Geoffrey Rush and Richard Attenborough.

The story is a real page-turner with a steady pace which kept my attention right to the end. However, if I have a slight criticism, it’s that some plot twists, such as the murderer’s identity, seemed to be signalled very early, while at other times key actions were taken by characters who had not been introduced.

These are minor failings, and overall this is a very enjoyable romp. I look forwards to Bruno’s next outing.

Update 13th May: the restructuring is complete, and you should see new reviews more fully integrated than previously. The process was non-trivial, and may spawn a blog post at some stage.
Thanks
Andrew

If you’ve seen the film “Young Winston”, based on this book, you will be familiar with some of the events. Other programmes and books have adequately explained his war leadership and his contribution to many serious political issues. However, the films and documentaries I have seen fail to capture the mischievous spirit communicated through this book.

This a fascinating study of a bygone age, when Britain maintained a great empire, when most politicians took the title Lord, and when politics and army officership were sports for those of independent means. Interestingly despite his aristocratic bloodline Churchill’s family was not particularly wealthy and some of the most poignant lessons stem from this.

Sometimes the sentiments in the book appear bloodthirsty or imperialistic, but you have to realise that at least part of the time Churchill is writing satirically, reflecting common values which you suspect he did not always share himself. When he is sincerely expressing his own serious ideals it is usually easy to detect.

These beliefs link both his skilful analysis of historical events, and Churchill’s account of his own development. For example he explains the British government’s failure to be magnanimous after the early victories of the Boer war as the reason that a relatively fast-moving and honourable conflict descended into “shocking evils” on both sides. The same failing is shown as a prime force in the leftward drift of Churchill’s own politics.

Churchill was a great writer, but it’s instructive to learn that his facility with English developed largely because he was judged early on to be too dim to cope with Latin and Greek. The classics loss was our gain, the legacy including both Churchill’s great deeds and great writing.

The last chapter is slightly disappointing, with Churchill’s early parliamentary career an anticlimax, and the story stops rather than ending on a major event. That apart, the pace, interest and humour are consistent throughout.

This book was written in 1930, when Churchill was already 56, but in the “wilderness years” before he regained high office and led Britain through the Second World War. It is interesting to speculate whether the book would have been very different if it were written either much earlier or later.

If you want adventure, read this book. If you want to understand a great man, read this book. If you want to do both and have a good laugh, read this book.

When this book came up on the Amazon Vine review system, I had hopes that it might offer something akin to the Foundation stories, or even Star Trek DS9. Sadly although there might be superficial resemblances to both, this book is just not well enough structured to engage my imagination the way they do.

The background is very Foundation-like: a stagnant galactic empire with rebellion brewing at its edges; human domination (although there are other sentient species); and technology which, faster than light interstellar travel and communications aside, looks remarkably like ours. The ships even “jump” between locations.

The major characters are well drawn, and the core idea, of a mutant seeking revenge on those who created him by illegal scientific experimentation is sound enough (although arguably done better by Mary Shelley in 1815). The problem is that the plot just doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s very difficult to tell who’s on which side, or even the state of play at the book’s end. In some ways it’s not unlike a very complicated “Spanish Prisoner” tale, but it doesn’t work. By halfway through I got very frustrated trying to understand the bigger picture, and I ended up unconvinced the author really has one himself.

One specific problem is that there’s no sense of scale: are the different locations adjacent solar systems, or galactic quadrants? Do the battles take place within the confines of planetary systems, or over a much wider range? It’s impossible to tell.

It doesn’t help that the jacket notes seem to have been written by someone other than the author, who in attempting to address the lack of a big picture introduces ideas not actually expressed in the book. The book could disappoint a reader who expects the story to match them.

I wanted to enjoy this book, but it frustrated me. The author writes the detailed stuff well, but next time needs to make sure his plot takes the reader somewhere.

OK? Now imagine that your brother is one of your country’s top military and political leaders. He’s Hermann Goering, and you are his younger brother Albert.

Thirty Four is the remarkable story of how Albert Goering protected and saved the threatened and dispossessed throughout the duration of the Third Reich. He also led acts of anti-Nazi defiance and even sabotage. His innumerable exploits ranged from moving people round the Skoda empire to places where they would be less vulnerable, through remarkable political interventions such as persuading Goebbels to classify Franz Lehar’s Jewish wife as an “honorary Aryan”, to acts of almost unbelievable audacity like driving a convoy to a concentration camp, demanding that it be filled with “workers” for Skoda, and then freeing those supplied in a nearby forest. What’s even more impressive is that through a combination of the protection afforded by his brother’s name, his own charm and political skill, and Hermann’s occasional protective or helpful interventions, he survived to tell the tale.

I’m always captivated by these “edge” stories from history, of those who didn’t fit the mould, and this is a fascinating, uplifting and inspiring tale. It’s not a hagiography – Albert’s personal weaknesses and his difficult post-war years are fully acknowledged – but throughout there’s a strong sense of his moral compass and his need to do something.

Although almost forgotten by history, Albert Goering needs to be remembered alongside Schindler and Wallenberg, and this book attempts to make that a possibility.

William Hastings Burke has made a decent job of telling the story, although by his own admission it should probably have been researched and told twenty years earlier, when it might have been possible to talk to those who knew Albert Goering themselves, rather than their descendants. The style of the book is deliberately chatty, mixing historical findings, dialogue from interviews and the author’s own wry observations from travelling around Europe with limited support and an even more limited budget.

If I have a complaint, it’s that the book is a bit short (maybe reflecting the difficulty of researching very personal stories at this distance), and it would have been great to include a few photographs of the central characters. However, these are minor niggles.

This is a good read, and very inspiring. Recommended.

However, to date I’m extremely frustrated by the quality of the tools available to capitalise on this opportunity. Most are, at best, OK for plain text blog entries, and none really delivers what I have come to expect, based on what’s available free on the PC platform.

My benchmark is Microsoft’s LiveWriter. This “free” software does exactly what I want: it provides a WYSIWYG preview as I write, using the stylesheet of my blog, provides style-based formatting (so I can create lists, headings and emphasise text, but otherwise add an absolute minimum of markup clutter), and provides the ability to manage all the post metadata, including things like hand-written post excerpts. It even has a plug-in architecture against which some kind soul has written a little plugin to manage custom fields, so I can easily add linkage to other articles or images in my photo albums.

Now maybe Microsoft have done their usual trick of hiding a lot of clever code behind a simple facade, but the above features don’t seem to be “rocket science”. There are several shareware packages on the PC (e.g. BlogJet) which have very similar capabilities. I therefore hoped that the iPad could deliver similar capabilities.

Nothing doing. For a start, all the available apps are strictly plain-text only. A couple have the ability to insert some HTML, but you need to know what you’re doing, and you have to visualise the result. If the available tags are not sufficient, then it becomes really painful. Just typing < p > on an iPad takes a grand total of 9, yes 9 keystrokes.

Some apps just don’t appear to work. MacJournal is a case in point: only when you’ve paid for it do you get a “read me” screen listing the limitations, and I couldn’t get it to connect at all. This is where I try to explore the “refund” option in iTunes… Worse, others succeed in corrupting existing entries. The worst offender, to my horror, is WordPress’ own app, which succeeded in filling my nicely formatted text with a load of random markup and line breaks. Deleted.

Beyond that, there are a couple which are trying, but not there yet. The best I have found to date is BlogPress, which seems to be reliable, handles basic metadata OK and at least has the concept of “select text and apply an HTML tag to the selection”. If I can engage the developers to extend this then it may become workable.

I did wonder if I could just post the flat text and then use the web-based editor in WordPress. However while this works fine on the PC, on the iPad the browser doesn’t seem to recognise the editor as a text area, so you can’t select text within in it. Foiled again.

I’ll keep you posted, but don’t be surprised if I can’t do so just from my iPad.

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Location:Leatherhead,United Kingdom

However, some of the supporting cast decisions were odd, to say the least. Most strange was the decision that while Victor Frankenstein and his brother William were both white, his father was played by a black actor, George Harris. Now Harris is a fine actor, and I have no problem with him playing a rich, powerful man in the right context – 2010 Britain, for example. But to cast him as Frankenstein senior, a Baron in early 1800s Switzerland, and in a story where one of the key themes is the inability of humans to see past The Creature’s physical difference from themselves to his inner abilities, that’s just plain wrong. It grated with me, and from comments I heard it grated with others too.

If that casting decision was PC tokenism, it was misplaced. If Danny Boyle was deliberately trying to contrast the loathing for the creature with our modern acceptance of people of different appearances, then it backfired. Sometimes the obvious route is the right one.

Personally, I’ve never got on reviewing significant text on a PC screen, and tend to work instead on printouts. The iPad has already proven itself an excellent reading tool, so much so that I will now download any lengthy document from my PC at work, and read it on the iPad, rather than just print it out.

Three third party applications make this much easier: DiskAid runs alongside or in place of iTunes to make managing iPad documents from the PC much easier, providing many of the functions missing from the Apple software, like folder views and drag/drop file operations. Full two-way folder-level synchronisation is promised for the next version. It also works well over USB – this, combined with the fact it’s not iTunes, makes it a good bet for corporate environments.

The companion iPad app, FileApp, is the best file management and general-purpose viewer I’ve found. And if you want to annotate a PDF document I can strongly recommend iAnnotate, which produces fully Acrobat-compatible markup, and you can either export the result via DiskAid, or simply email it to yourself.

MS Office documents are a bit more of a challenge. For example, there are many apps which view or edit Word documents. They vary from acceptable to poor. None, as far as I can see, supports embedded files, embedded objects, or style-based formatting. More critically for document reviewing, there’s almost no support for change tracking. Most apps just ignore Word markup. The only current exception is Documents To Go, which at least displays the markup and preserves it in exported documents, but doesn’t allow you to add to it. The work-around is to just type your comments into the main text, email the document to yourself, and use “compare” against the original on the PC, but that’s just plain crude.

Support for other MS Office documents is even more patchy. There are lots of apps which will read an Excel spreadsheet, but most can’t export back to the same format. And there are plenty of PowerPoint viewers, but they all present the slides as a long scrolling document. None of them have the ability to effectively show a presentation full screen on the iPad with a simple “tap to advance” model. Surely I can’t be the only person in the world who recognises the potential power of iPad+PowerPoint for presenting ideas to people in small meetings, so why have all the developers ignored this opportunity?

I await the iPad version of SoftMaker Office with hope, because the SoftMaker guys have successfully delivered full Word compatibility to Pocket PCs for years. It can be done…

The iPad should also be an ideal note-taking device, but several things mitigate against it. Firstly, the applications seem universally crude, with no rich text or outlining support, and limited or no hierarchical arrangement features. Some are quite “flashy”, with good support for doing things like pasting in pictures from the photo album, but what I need is more structured. The standard, of course, is Microsoft OneNote, which has transformed my general note-taking and list management on the PC, but Apple and most developers seem to be studiously it’s example. The one ray of light is MobileNoter, which aims to be a partner application to OneNote. At the moment it’s incomplete – it does quite a good job of synchronising your OneNote notebooks from the PC, and displaying them faithfully, but input is a bit iffy and you can’t create new sections or pages on the iPad. The “quick notes”, which can be freely manipulated, are plain text only. That said, the developers promise that the abilities to take notes in OneNote format and add them into your synchronised notebooks are coming, so maybe this omission will be fixed.

Creating content is generally a bit painful because of the restricted text input model Apple have imposed. For a start, the multi-modal keyboard is very annoying. The main screen just has the basic letters, and you have to switch modes two or three times for anything else. This is OK for bulk text, rubbish for anything with numbers or “special” characters such as the dash or the colon! No wonder the youth of today are losing touch with punctuation…

I do wonder if Apple were influenced by this wonderful video of the “laptop with no keyboard” from the Onion News Network, and didn’t get that it’s meant to be satirical?

If you make a mistake while typing, it’s quite painful to have to roughly point with a finger, then steer the insertion point exactly with the magnifier, then make your corrections. There are no arrow keys to quickly navigate a few letters back, no reversible “undo”. I also find the lack of drag and drop very frustrating.

The predictive text / dynamic spelling is rubbish compared with other platforms, offering only a single option and then usually only when you’ve typed almost the whole word. Worse, if it corrects incorrectly, and you delete the text and type your version again, it just changes it again unless you manually over-ride it. The Microsoft version is much more intelligent, and gives you a “stop changing…” option after the first time.

Some of these restrictions and crudities make no sense at all. Others might make sense on the iPhone, but on a full screen tablet device they are just plain frustrating. But what really bugs me is that the pocket PC, despite originating in an even smaller form factor than the iPhone, gets all this right.

The iPad is a great tool for some purposes, but it’s potential for business use is thwarted by Apple’s inability to recognise good ideas in the non-Mac world, and a young application ecosystem where key capabilities are still developing. Getting business value feels like a bit of a battle, even if it is far and away the best platform for Angry Birds!

The trouble is that for every St. Paul’s there must be a Bletchley Park – an architectural mish-mash which while possibly important, successful or even revered is inherently inelegant, or even downright ugly.
My analysis is that behind the glossy facade, the iPad software architecture has to be the best current example of “Ugly Architecture”.

In many ways it’s strongly reminiscent of PCs in the days of DOS, or maybe Windows 3.0, before the emergence of strong component-based architectures and unifying design standards in Windows 95 and NT.
The fundamental problem is the application-centric model, in which each application is a stand-alone combination of code and data, with very few shared services or components. This naturally leads each application developer to “do their own thing”, implementing separate, widely varying solutions for communications, document storage, printing support and so on. Apart from a token “open in another app…” supported by some applications, there’s effectively no cross-application linking, leading to massive duplication of functionality and data, and some significant functional limitations, for example the inability to directly open a URL embedded in a document.

Each application has its own data area, which may or may not interact with iTunes, web sites or a PC via FTP, websites via WebDAV or various different cloud storage services. Data which should arguably be general visible just isn’t – you can upload video files to the photos area, but they won’t be visible in the videos list. To test a variety of editors with a document you need to deliver a different copy of the document to each app.

Each application supports different models for document exchange, and different cloud stores, so a user potentially has to have multiple separate cloud accounts. While “public” cloud storage may be fine for individuals’ personal data (although individuals may still have valid security and privacy concerns), it is a real concern if used for corporate information. In corporate contexts, connectivity, security, copyright, access rights, service levels, data protection and privacy obligations, regulatory and legal constraints may all be compromised or complicated by cloud use, and become significant issues.

There’s also an interesting security implication to this which you don’t often see discussed. Because there’s no accessible file system, and no extensibility model for the application filing model, there’s nowhere for anti-virus solutions to run, and as of today iPhones and iPads are effectively unprotected devices. There are probably numerous iPads in the wild acting as festering reservoirs of infected documents. Those who are security conscious can’t be happy about this, and I know that many corporate security departments are making moves to ban connectivity to corporate services for that reason.

Even if an application interacts with the host PC more directly, you get multiple copies of documents, typically the original, a copy in iTunes and one on the device, with no mechanism to synchronise them or compare version information. Apple’s own applications such as Pages are even worse, with a completely separate iTunes space from their own “My Documents” spaces, and an additional copy step in each direction. This is a version control and management nightmare!

Why could the iPad not support a simple shared filing area with proper two-way synchronisation to the host PC, as the Pocket PC has had from day 1?

The communications architecture is a similar mess. The only application which can communicate with the host PC over USB is iTunes, but iTunes can’t use WiFi. All other apps have to use WiFi, but there’s no real shared comms application infrastructure, so the result is another diverse and fragmented “roll your own” free for all. The most obvious way for a companion device to talk to its host PC, BlueTooth, isn’t supported at all!

The WiFi only design works fine in the confines of, say, a small home office. Elsewhere it’s problematic at best. Paid WiFi (e.g. in a hotel) is typically limited to a single device, so you’ll end up paying twice if you want to connect both devices. Corporate WiFi systems are typically similar, and you may not be allowed to connect the iPad directly. Even if you do get connectivity, these networks are often set up to prevent routing between devices, as a security measure, so that’s that, then.

The alternative is to set up either the PC or iPad as a hot-spot itself. On the iPad, this is only possible on jailbroken devices. On the PC, it can be complicated and opens up potential security issues. Neither is ideal.

Apple’s policies effectively put software development back in the Stone Age, in the particular sense that “monolithic” means “single lump of rock”. Each application has to be “stand alone”, implementing many things which should arguably be shared. For example, each file management application implements its own storage management dialogs, its own comms model, its own browser, its own PDF and Word file viewers, each with their own subset of functionality, dialogs and gesture support, and so forth. There simply doesn’t seem to be any real concept of shared components or companion applications. Let’s be clear: I’m not criticising the application developers for trying their best to provide a comprehensive solution – my criticism is directed squarely at the crass architecture through which Apple force such an approach.

Even those applications which implement the “open in another app…” capability to open documents in other viewers suffer two common problems: you frequently have to open the document natively before you can send it elsewhere, and the act of doing so usually creates yet another copy of the document to manage separately!

Ironically, where there are shared components they impose significant constraints and limitations. The most obvious is the keyboard. Essentially there’s only one way to get text directly into any application, and that’s to use the on-screen keyboard configured exactly as the application developer decides. It’s “my way or the highway”. This is a dramatic contrast with the Microsoft world, where even a humble 2003-era Pocket PC supports not only a variety of built-in and third-party on-screen keyboards, but also handwriting recognition, character recognition (like the Palm Pilot), Swype, and even limited voice recognition. Importantly, these are all user-selectable at any time text input is required. On the iPad you can buy an app with a different keyboard layout, or dictation capability, but you have to cut and paste the raw text into your target application and typically reformat it to suit. This is simply primitive.

What makes all this worse is that the iPad application approval/delivery model makes it unlikely that anyone will innovate a better solution. No approved application can have legal access to another app’s or central iTunes data. Without approval, you won’t appear in the App Store or run on non-jailbroken devices, so Apple simply impose their will, whether good or bad.

OK. I am starting to love my iPad, but the software architect within me is incredibly frustrated. This great hardware is hamstrung by a clumsy, unimaginative, software architecture and oppressive centralist control by those who worship according to The Book of Jobs. It could be so much better.

</rant>

For several years in the mid-noughties, my main laptop was a convertible Tablet PC (actually a succession of Toshiba M-series tablets). I liked these devices with their dual ability to function as a subtle note-taking device in meetings or on the move, and as a fully-fledged laptop most of the time. Ultimately, though, such devices are too great a compromise: too heavy, battery-hungry and stylus-dependent for use as an eReader or travel companion, not powerful enough to meet my demands for a laptop capable of supporting virtualisation, multiple development platforms and heavy duty image processing. My main laptop is now a 15” Toshiba, and it does the main jobs very well, but I’ve lost my subtle note-taker, unless I want to lug an old tablet PC as well.

Also, since 1999 I’ve always carried a Pocket PC, for the last 5 years a succession of HP iPaq 4700s (sadly, they don’t last forever). My PDA is brilliant for checking my diary, playing games, as a music player and for a variety of other uses. Thanks to the German company SoftMaker I even have a fully-fledged office suite which is absolutely compatible with Office 2003, right down to the menu and options dialog structures. I have composed some quite large documents using it, but unfortunately the screen size makes it just too fiddly for heavy-duty use.

It’s also unfortunate that HP set the bar so high with the iPaq 4700. I should really have been able to update it with a device including a phone, mobile internet connectivity and GPS, but two attempts to do so have ended in frustration (see “Digital Convergence – Still Waiting” and “Annoyance-Based Technology Selection” for details). Even HP haven’t really managed to replace it – their nearest current equivalent is much chunkier and has a much inferior low-contrast screen.

Enter the iPad. Before I start complaining, let’s acknowledge that this is a great piece of hardware design which does some things really well. For a start, it’s a brilliant eReader: clear, light and an ideal size. When I print documents for off-line reading, I usually print two pages to an A4 side. The iPad screen almost exactly matches this A5 preference, but with the great advantage that I can easily zoom in or change fonts and text orientation if required. To read web pages I can either exploit the mobile capabilities, or save them to PDFs on my PC.

As a mobile web browser it generally looks very promising. Again, the size is just right, with none of the compromises of phone/PDA solutions. Apple’s lack of Flash support is an occasional pain, but otherwise no problems so far.

It’s also going to make an excellent portable photographic portfolio. The screen is widely acknowledged as one of the best on any portable device, with wide viewing angles and good colour fidelity, and my photos look great on it. Getting iTunes to show a sensible album structure is a bit of a challenge (of which more later), but I’m now fairly satisfied, although I may end up using third party software which doesn’t insist on renaming my files and hiding the filenames!

Battery life is great when measured by the standards of fully-fledged laptops: at least two days fairly steady use on tasks like document reading, note taking and web browsing. Of course strictly speaking we should measure by the standard of a monotasking PDA  (I assume that “monotasking” is the opposite of “multitasking”, but I may have just made that up ), and on that basis it’s not so good, but still acceptable.

So the hardware is great, and everyone loves the glossy touch interface. The problem is that, as the saying goes, beauty is only skin deep. The elegant facade hides an astonishingly crude and restrictive software architecture, which puts me strongly in mind of a 1990 DOS computer (albeit with a glossy graphical skin). The problems of that architecture will be the topic of my next post…

The story romps along with a pace and complexity reminiscent of “24″, and I mean that as a great compliment. It’s enjoyable, and you won’t want to put it down.

But…, and it’s a big but, you may also find this book a bit frustrating. Too many of the details are clumsy, or just plain wrong.

For example, one of the characters is supposed to be a Mancunian ex-DCI, but instead of making him sound like Gene Hunt the author has him tacking “innit” on every sentence, like the dimmest illiterate London hoody. Worse, the author thinks that DCI stands for Deputy Chief Inspector! Elsewhere the villain uses Apple Mac control sequences to initiate events, but on a laptop which is variously described as “homemade” and an IBM T43.

And is it really credible that a top air crash investigation team would be taken in by fake flight data records inconsistent with all their other findings, and take almost a day to start trying to cross-check them?

The book also suffers from the increasingly common American fiction malady of stereotypical good guys and bad guys. The former are a politically correct cross section of races, ages and sexes, but all portrayed as handsome, wholesome and beyond reproach. The villains are a bunch of Ulster thugs, the one gay guy, and an overweight, bespectacled computer nerd called Dennis. That’s so, well, Jurassic Park!

This is still a good yarn, but more focus on the details and more rounded characters would have made it a better one.

I recently converted my blog from an old bespoke (= “custom”, for my American friends) solution to one based on WordPress. However, this created a problem, in that the WordPress model is to hold all content in the database, and that wasn’t the right model for me.

Firstly, I have a number of articles which are very long for a blog post, and I had no interest in restructuring them. I also didn’t want to break external links to the existing articles.

Next, I decided that I wanted the freedom to continue to write in that style. Some of my writing takes several weeks, and it works for me to draft it as separate HTML pages. I also sometimes want to include active content or multiple images, and I don’t want to create a large and unwieldy WordPress database full of such stuff.

Finally, my online photo galleries are managed and generated using Jalbum, and I wanted to find a way of neatly integrating single images into my blog, complete with the watermarks and metadata extraction which Jalbum manages so well, without duplicating that functionality in WordPress.

This is probably typical of many older web sites, but WordPress doesn’t really embrace the integration of external content. This article describes how I solved this problem, and a WordPress plugin I have developed to make my solution reusable.

I have therefore now created a number of new “views” of my blog, and a number of specialist feeds, as follows:

• Thoughts on the World. This is the original and complete blog and feed, and will give you access to all my content, in chronological order. Expect a mix of articles including my observations of the world of software development and architecture, humorous observations, photography and personal announcements.
• The blog address is www.andrewj.com/blog
• The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtsFromAndrewJohnston
• The Professional Blog. This will focus on professional articles based around my observations of the world of software development and architecture. Articles for AgileArchitect.org will appear here, as will updates on my products and publications, and I may cross-post relevant reviews. You’ll also see any practical announcements relating to my websites and feeds.
• The blog address is www.andrewj.com/blog/pro
• The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/StructureOfTheWorld
• The Photo Blog. This will focus on my photos, and photography-related articles and reviews. You’ll also see any practical announcements relating to my websites and feeds. There’s also a separate feed for updates to my gallery.
• The blog address is www.andrewj.com/blog/photo
• The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ImagesOfTheWorld
• The feed for my gallery is http://feeds.feedburner.com/GalleryOfTheWorld
• The Review Pages. This presents my reviews of books, films and music. You’ll also see any practical announcements relating to my websites and feeds.
• The blog address is www.andrewj.com/blog/reviews
• The feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReviewsOfTheWorld

For more details, visit my Blog Views and Feeds page.

My new blog is now live. This allows a lot more flexibility, including commenting etc.

Please can you make sure you are taking your RSS feed from one of the following:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtsFromAndrewJohnston (preferred)

http://www.andrewj.com/blog/index.php/feed/ (straight from my site)

I still need to update some of the links to longer old articles, so please bear with me if these are a bit odd over the next few days. Also you may see some duplicate items in the Feedburner feed – if so, please ignore these, and they should clear shortly.

Thanks, and enjoy the new blog.

Andrew

Migration of our web sites and email to the new hosting server is almost complete. See previous article/rant for some of my findings. After some initial frustration with my hosting provider (WebFusion) when I discovered the
limitations of their new Linux shared hosting services compared with the old one, I have to say a big “Thank You” for their efficiency in finding a better solution for me, and providing me with effective technical support to get it up and running.

If you do have any problems with our sites or email, let me know…

I’m currently developing a new blog, based on WordPress. This will make it easier to post “on the fly” than with the current solution, hand-carved from XML and ASP (now PHP).

When the new blog is running, I’m going to have a regular post for fans of my photography, so you can see what I’ve been working on. In the meantime, I’ve updated my gallery pages so they are a bit easier to navigate, bookmark and search.

And talking about my photography, I’ve recently been accepted by the Alamy stock agency. So please all rush at once and spend lots of money licensing my pictures for all those uses you’ve dreamed of but were too polite to mention

See you soon,

Andrew

The new book  has a very broad scope – trying to understand the economics and human psychology which drive aspects of human existence as disparate as female oppression and prostitution, terrorism, effective medical treatment, altruism, vehicle safety, and global problems such as climate change.

As before, Levitt and Dubner spend a lot of time challenging received wisdom, citing detailed research and comprehensive data which prove that in many cases our common understanding of how things work "just ain’t so". Typically the underlying research is not their own, but they have done a wonderful job of bringing together a larger number of different findings into a set of readily readable chapters, each of which have a strong unifying theme in the form of a key question. My favourite: "What Do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo Have In Common?"

Towards the end of the book, they also make an interesting proposition, that a large number of human problems can be resolved with relatively simple solutions, if we have the will to make it happen. The adoption of seat belts is cited as a major previous success, and the idea is then developed to explore several possible relatively low-cost geo-engineering solutions to global warming. Views may differ on how humanity must balance behavioural and technical solutions to its current challenges, but their argument is a strong one, based on a frank and realistic assessment of typical behaviour.

As a counterpoint, the final chapter recounts an experiment which proved that much of human economic behaviour can be replicated in other animals. I just loved the story of the monkeys who were introduced to the concept of money, and promptly invented prostitution!

Despite the range and depth of the subject matter, the book is always readable, with frequent "laugh out loud" moments. Anyone can pick up this book, enjoy it and take away an improved understanding of the underlying drivers for human (and monkey) behaviour. I freely recommend it to anybody interested in doing so.

After a good general introduction, the second chapter is on photographic technology. This starts with a discussion on analog vs digital photography which rather annoyed me, with its gross over-simplification of digital processing and generalisations on digital camera characteristics, with some confusion between dynamic range and aperture settings. In fairness many of the omissions (such as RAW workflows) are dealt with at length later in the book, but this section sets a simplistic tone which is not representative of the rest. The section proceeds with a reasonably fair comparison of different camera formats, albeit slightly hung up on pixel size, and a good, even-handed discussion and recommendations on lenses and additional equipment, but contains nothing of great value to the reasonably experienced photographer.

The chapter on shooting techniques is the core of the book. This starts with a discussion on the various objectives of architectural photography, and moves on to consider how to extract very different images from the same basic subject. After that the book leads the reader through perspective and its relationship to camera position, and the various ways to correct perspective distortions such as converging verticals. All this is done with clear examples, showing the effects by comparison of two or more shots of the same subject.

The various sections on composition are excellent, with good advice on how to emphasise different aspects, or make an image more inclusive, but I found the section on panoramas a bit basic, with no real advice on how to avoid common stitching distortions. A similar complaint might be levelled at the sections on exposure and shooting interiors, which are very dry and concise, although I can’t find fault with anything which is said. The author does make the positive recommendation of using naturalistic HDR to address extreme dynamic range, and provides good exterior and interior examples, plus a comparitive example of the technique overdone.

A following section on lighting considerations, including shadows, reflections, weather and seasons is short, but has some good recommendations, including how to exploit different conditions for different moods. The chapter then finishes with a short section on photographing buildings creatively, which contains a number of simple yet powerful suggestions.

The third chapter is a slight oddity – a "commentary" by experienced architectural photographer Marcus Bredt. This summarises a lot of the main chapter’s themes, but with a different photographer’s words and examples. In another book this would be the guest forward, but I rather like this "tell them what you have told them" positioning.

The final chapter is on image processing. It starts with quite a detailed discussion on RAW vs JPEG, and a rather mechanical account of setting up a RAW conversion in Adobe Camera Raw. There’s nothing wrong with these, but they feel slightly out of place. A useful but short section on perspective correction is followed by a long worked example of general image adjustment in PhotoShop, which has nothing to do with the book’s main topic. Worked examples on panoramas and HDR are more relevant, but still have too much image-specific blow by blow detail and insufficient discussion of the general issues which arise when applying these techniques to architectural photography.

The book finishes with a short and very basic section on creative adjustments, but there’s no overall conclusion. I was hoping for more detail on things like perspective correction techniques, but that’s missing.

This book is rather like a sandwich with too much boring bread, and a tasty filling which isn’t quite thick enough. The processing section feels like filler, and detracts from the excellent core on composing and shooting architectural photographs. The latter is good enough for me to recommend the book, but I must warn you that some topics will leave you wanting more. This is a good book, but could have been better.

Not only are the victims a series of Oxford University academics, who meet progressively stickier ends, but the central character is a lonely polymath with an ambivalent attitude to authority, and his own intellectual obsessions. That and the Oxford locations are both reminiscent of Dexter’s stories, but this is very much its own historic tale, focused on the turmoil caused by the multiple violent shifts in English religion between the reigns of Henry and Elizabeth.

This is a well-written and captivating story, which kept me turning the pages. The characters are all well-drawn, whether heroes, victims or villains. A few are well-established historical personages, like Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, and these are portrayed very much as we might expect. Similarly the practical aspects of Elizabethan life and the physical details of the Oxford and London locations are brought clearly and colourfully to life by Parris’ descriptions.

The decision to tell the story in the first person, from the standpoint of the central character, is a slightly odd one, in that it allows for no uncertainty in respect of his motives or progress. His own ambivalence on certain moral issues, and some self-doubt, are well portrayed, but overall I think I prefer a slightly more neutral viewpoint in stories of this nature.

Another minor complaint is that my pre-publication copy of the book had a few errors of typography and grammar, but I hope these will be eliminated in the fully proof-read published version.

Those niggles aside, this is an excellent read, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who fancies a good mediaeval murder mystery.

This is a great shame, because multishot techniques such as panoramic stitching and HDR are areas in which smaller software vendors have frequently produced powerful, innovative, inexpensive software solutions. Also, it makes the book less relevant to anyone who cannot afford (or does not want to invest in) full-blown Photoshop CS3.

The introductory sections are quite good, introducing the reader to basic multishot workflow techniques. However, there’s not much here for the more advanced reader. For example, the book explains how RAW files differ from processed files, but doesn’t really explore the pros and cons of feeding RAW files straight into multishot processing vs pre-processing them in a separate RAW convertor.

Surprisingly, the authors decide to start their exploration of multishot techniques with super-resolution, combining very similar shots to increase resolution or decrease noise. This is an odd choice, partly because it’s a relatively rare requirement, and partly because the only effective software support appears to be from PhotoAcute, which makes this a "one solution" chapter. Given that there’s another section at the end dealing with issues like sharpening and local contrast enhancement, it might have made more sense in that position.

The next section turns the attention to focus stacking. This is at least a balanced chapter, exploring techniques with Phtoshop, PhotoAcute, CombineZM and Helicon Focus. However, rather than exploring the options within the stacking tools, the authors seem happier to take the default output, and then extensively post-process it in Photoshop.

The section on panoramic stitching is particularly disappointing. Although there are a wealth of alternatives available, some of which are absolutely excellent, the authors don’t do a single worked example using anything other than Photoshop ‘s Photomerge command. They also use some very poor examples: some are just bad photography, like the wedding group with a number of people facing away from the camera, but others simply emphasise the limitations of the Photoshop focus. In one example the authors show a first-cut panorama which Photoshop has distorted wildly and stitched badly, but there is no "corrected" version.

HDR gets a better treatment, but again very much "Photoshop first". After a good introduction to the general subject, the first worked example uses manual blending of layers in Photoshop, then there’s a brief but effective example with PhotoAcute, then it’s back to Photoshop again! Finally they get to the clear leader in this space, Photomatix Pro, but again there’s very little attempt to explore the options of this powerful software. One key function is simply described by comparison to a Photoshop CS3 function, which is meaningless if you don’t have that software. FDRTools gets a surprisingly detailed review, given that the authors were working with a beta release of the software which was clearly not fully functional.

The final section is about improving image micro-contrast. While of interest, it’s not really a multishot technique, being more about various post-processing options in Photoshop. This is another missed opportunity to explore the trade-offs between pre-processing and post-processing component images, which would have perhaps been more useful.

Overall this book left me frustrated, as an opportunity lost. I did learn things from it, but instead of a balanced overview and keen insights into technique, this is just too much about fiddling in Photoshop.

A few years ago I toyed with replacing my trusty PDA, phone and digital camera with a combined unit. That was not a success, and I ended up with a second hand SmartPhone, an iPaq 4700 PDA, and the T-Mobile MDA as my car satnav (a job it does acceptably). You can read an analysis of my trials and tribulations, entitled “Annoyance-Based Technology Selection”.

Last year, with my old mobile phone wearing out, I tried again, with depressingly similar results. Someone once said “Those who do not learn from History are condemned to repeat it.” Why didn’t I follow this excellent advice?

In the introduction, Barr suggests you shouldn’t read the book if you can’t relate to his images, but that’s wrong. If your photographic interests are sweeping landscapes, stunning action or unambiguous portraits then you may well be puzzled by the images, as Barr focuses strongly on abstract details, usually of faded industrial objects. However, rejecting the book on that basis would cause a great many readers to unjustly ignore this work.

After an introductory chapter in which Barr analyses some of his own work in detail, the core of the book focuses on success and failure in photography: what photographs well; how photographs, and photographers, may succeed or fail; and what to do if you are dissatisfied with your ability to find images, capture and render them, or present them to others.

Where this book really scores is in the numerous "how to" bullet lists, of things to do and processes to follow in order to both find an image, and then ensure you have the best possible composition of it.

George Barr is obviously, as a project manager once described herself to me, a "very listy sort of person". Sometimes this works very well, but at other times it feels a little like things are being analysed past the point of usefulness.

In the final chapter Barr presents a pair of five-level capability models, of the form much loved by management methodologists, against which a photographer’s technical skill and artistic achievement can be measured. After guides to assessing one’s level, there are then suggested steps to progress between levels, encapsulating the book’s earlier advice. This has to be the most scientific way to present "taking your art to the next level", but it works well.

The book is not perfect. In particular some sections where Barr analyses individual images are poorly laid out, with the discussion two pages or more adrift from the relevant photos. In the middle of the book the analytical approach gets taken to an extreme, listing multiple variants of corner and frame structure, and I confess to hurrying through this.

Ultimately, however, such criticisms are relatively minor, if you focus on the book’s core strengths. I would heartily recommend this book to any photographer seeking inspiration for those times, which we all experience, when photography becomes difficult, disappointing or frustrating. Plus, of course, anyone wanting to move up to the next level.

Basically this is a book about a grim and serious subject – the kidnapping of children by organised peadophiles – and as a result it demands a rather grim and serious treatment. At the end there is hope for the boy’s parents and the detective, but therwise this is an unleavened slog which does not make you feel good about the world.

That said, the book is quite well written, and held my attention with its steady pace and well-drawn characters. I expect that readers who prefer their crime novels straight, rather than with Hiaasen-like comic twists, will enjoy it more than I did.

However, I can’t agree with the fulsome praise heaped on the book by other writers such as Lincoln Child and Harlan Coben. It isn’t that well written. The protagonists always get the information they require for the next stage of the trail before the appropriate baddy comes to a well-flagged sticky end, and a bit more obfuscation might have been better. The central characters are reasonably well drawn, but many of the others are very stereotypical.

The hero of the piece is himself a stereotype retired cop become private detective, blessed with both prodigious physical talents and well-honed police skills. While he has suffered a great tragedy, he doesn’t seem to have any real weaknesses. Homer knew that a real hero needs his "Achilles Heel", but Behr is like Sherlock Holmes and Casey Ryback (from "Under Siege") rolled into one. I realised part way through the book that I had been mentally pronouncing his name "Bayer", but was probably meant to pronounce it "Bear". Come on, we can try harder than this!

While I’m on a critical note, I was also annoyed by the cover artwork! One of the plot’s turning points is where Behr works out exactly where the child was snatched, with careful description of the street names. The cover does indeed show an abandoned bicycle at a suburban US road junction, but the street name is clearly wrong, and in the book the bicycle is stolen, not abandoned. I wish publishers would show a bit more attention to detail!

If you want to read a solid, serious crime drama then this may be a good choice, but don’t expect humour or challenge from this book.

My photography zone has been updated with images from my trip to Maine, Vermont and New York last autumn, and from the dramatic Winter weather in the UK. Photos from my trip to the Venice carnivale should start to follow shortly.

I’ve just completed a photographic holiday following roughly the traditional “grand circle” route, and I couldn’t have got some of my most successful shots without these books.

The author provides consistent, detailed instructions for each location, including guidance on lenses and timing. Sometimes he even tells you which rock to stand on! Follow his instructions carefully, and you’ll usually get good results, although some instructions require careful interpretation.

It’s also great fun shouting “snap!” when you realise the only other souls in some lonely location are also clutching a copy of the same book.

All three volumes have recently been updated, with high quality colour photos throughout, and a comprehensive index of locations including ratings for accessibility and scenic and photographic value, invaluable if a tight schedule means making difficult choices.

I’m already planning my next trip using volume 3! Highly recommended.

This isn’t a Bond film, it’s like a bad entry in the Bourne series. Where is the elegance, the charm we should expect of Bond? Bond films have always traditionally leavened the action with humour and beauty. Both were spectacularly missing from this episode.

I greatly enjoyed this book, but I do have a few reservations. Firstly I spotted a number of silly errors. If your central character’s party piece is to quote pi to many digits, you need to make sure that the first nine you quote in the text are correct, but they weren’t. There were also minor characters whose names changed inexplicably, and segments of repeated text in which key figures were different. I was working from a pre-publication proof, and these errors may be corrected before publication, but it’s not an encouraging sign.

More critically, this story follows the current fashion where the heroes and villains are not just men but supermen and women. There are too many "stunning" characters who add model-like looks to top academic credentials and great athleticism. It’s also slightly hard to believe when the hero suddenly reveals hacking skills beyond the abilities of his well-funded pursuers. The story would work equally well with characters who excel in individual fields, and would be more believable as a result.

The main denoument is fine, with most issues resolved well, but I found the actual end of the book slightly disappointing and a bit of a non-sequiteur. It’s not a big problem, and I understand what the author was trying to do stylistically, but it doesn’t quite work. That said, it doesn’t detract significantly from the main body of the book, which is well-written with a steady pace and enough twists and turns to keep the most avid reader alert.

This is a very contemporary book, and it does run the risk of becoming dated or overtaken by events. As a simple example the quoted oil prices have been significantly exceeded before the book’s publication, and the current credit crunch is taking international markets in a rather different direction to the story. It may not work in ten years’ time, but for now it’s a very good read.

I’ve also always had great admiration for those photographers whose work can really move the emotions, particularly the great landscape photographers like Ansel Adams. Taking good representational photographs is hard enough, but establishing a composition which can both emotionally inspire the viewer and satisfy the critics is even harder.

Over the last year or so I’ve been rediscovering photography with a Digital SLR, and on my new photography pages you’ll find some of my efforts, plus (in coming weeks) some hints, tips and tools for the D-SLR photographer.

In this book Steven Levitt develops ideas about a number of aspects of economic and social development which challenge received wisdom. He then both challenges traditional analyses, and offers solid support for his theories using detailed analysis of a number of unusual but highly reliable data sources.

For example, he attributes the dramatic fall of crime rates in the USA in the 1990s to greater access to abortion 20 years earlier, rather than traditional explanations like better policing. Drawing on a number of unimpeachable data sources he provides strong support for his hypothesis over more common ones.

Another fascinating chapter analyses the economics of drug dealing, and concludes that most crack dealers would be better off with regular minimum-wage jobs.

However, these are the high points, and towards the end the book starts to feel like the authors didn’t have enough material for a 200 page book. There’s a fair amount of repetition, and the later chapters start to feel a bit light. The last chapter, on trends in children’s names, is really rather boring and tells us very little of interest.

This is a shame, because the core of the book is excellent. It will hold your interest, but don’t expect a lot of pages for your money. Maybe the authors are genuinely very clever.

Philip Kerr has taken this Newton and his assistant, and turned them into Holmes and Watson, placing them at the centre of a serious intrigue involving financial crimes, political battles and religious atrocities.

It’s a brilliant period piece which explains a great deal I didn’t understand about Restoration Europe. Like his other historical novels Kerr has also carefully used the language of the time, writing in a style reminiscent of Newton’s contemporaries such as Pepys, but always readily understandable.

Some of the period detail is quite gruesome, and can be little uncomfortable. This is not a book for the young or seriously squeamish. However the content is appropriate given the quite dark nature of the story.

I haven’t enjoyed all of Kerr’s more recent works. For example "The Shot", which was a similar kind of period piece, was just too complicated. I have no such complaints about "Dark Matter" – a brilliant historical thriller.

Ansel Adams was clearly both a gentleman and a gentle man, who lived to create great images for the pleasure and education of others. We are exceptionally lucky that he left us both his wonderful pictures, but also a few books which explain not only how, but also why some of them were created.

This book covers a photography career of over 60 years, taking 40 of his greatest pictures, and describing how they were made. Although much of the technical advice is still valid today, a lot of it requires on the fly translation from the language of large format cameras and glass plates to the world of digital SLRs, with tiny sensors and vast memory cards. That exercise might put some people off, but it makes you think harder about his advice, and that’s a good thing.

However, where this book really scores is with the human stories of how and why Adams made certain pictures. Two examples stick in my mind.

Firstly, how one of his iconic views of Yosemite was made after a day’s hard hiking with a full size view camera, large wooden tripod, and just twelve glass plates. He suspected that he had wasted the first eleven, and had just one left for a favourite view of Half Dome. He took extra care with that one, and the results are still thrilling 80 years on.

Then there’s his tale of photographing 50s Californian farming families. This is a charming insight into how a great photographer of people develops both trust and ideas, lubricating both with an appropriate supply of beer. You suspect these days were not so hard for Adams as the great Yosemite hikes.

"Examples" also contains some remarkable philosophical insights into the process and role of photography. The one which now sticks foremost in my mind is that enthusiasm for a subject will not create great photographs – you have to visualise the image and its impact mentally, then make it. This is perhaps the single most powerful piece of advice in the book.

In 1935 Adams was concerned that the advent of 35mm would result in a vast number of bad photographs. Yet he was keen on the new medium, because he could also see its benefits. The same page could be written ten times over about digital photography, but you know that had Adams lived a little longer he would have been a keen PhotoShop-er.

This is a good book on photographic technique, but there are others. But there are few books which give such an insight into the soul of a great photographer.

If I had to sum up the style in a single word, it would have to be "Mod". The band’s influences seem to be drawn largely from the great tradition of guitar-based London bands such as the early Who and the Jam, although some of the vocal harmonies put me most strongly in mind of Secret Affair (without the sax, of course!)

The music ranges from rock to ballad, but with a common sound courtesy of Blake Feehan’s crisp vocals, and, in many cases, a driving rhythm guitar. Most of the tracks work well, but my personal preference are the tighter, upbeat, "bouncy" numbers. If I had to pick a favourite it would be Plastic Lullaby, but the opening track, Crash and Burn, runs it a close second.

The musicianship of all three Decoders is excellent. Jon Flint’s drums are spot on, and I’ve already mentioned Blake’s tight, melodic vocals, but these two would be nowhere without Martin Lister, who apart from a guest appearances on a couple of tracks plays all the other instruments, including bass and lead guitars, as well as occasional keyboards and additional vocals. The drawback, if there is one, is that it is impossible for the band to recreate this multi-handed approach in live performance, unless they recruit some extra musicians. However, having seen them as a three-hander live I have to admit that they manage the difficult feat surprisingly well!

The inventive lyrics vary to fit the songs, from "angry young man" political commentary to balladic love song. I wouldn’t claim to understand them all, but I particularly enjoyed the humorous observation of how what a man wants in a woman changes over time, in Plastic Lullaby.

As I said, I wish The Decoders every success. Keep up the good work!

In his introduction Bryson complains that he could not get interested in science at school because all the text books were dull. Admittedly I’m a few years younger, which might make a difference, but I was exposed from an early age to a vast array of well-written and beautifully-illustrated books on a range of science subjects. The conclusion is simple: unlike most who get interested in science, Bill Bryson is one of those people whose thinking is almost entirely verbal in nature, and he’s written a book for those of the same persuasion. And he’s done a very good job of it.

If you have a passing familiarity with most of the topics the book’s clear prose will refresh and add to your knowledge, but I do wonder whether those without much background will be able to successfully visualise the subjects. On the other hand his insistence on writing out large numbers in words or with all the zeros might soothe the fears of the mathematically inexperienced, but is plain annoying if you’re happy with scientific notation.

Honouring its title, the book covers an impressive amount of ground. A very well structured journey takes us through cosmology, geology, palaeontology, chemistry, physics, meteorology, biology, evolution and extinction, genetics and the emergence of mankind. The topics are split so that the walk is roughly chronological, both in respect of the target time frame, and also in respect of the development of scientific understanding, a clever feat.

Throughout Bryson explains all the key ideas, focusing more on those which have stood the test of time. But his real interest is the scientists, especially the more interesting ones – the eccentric, sociopathic and dishonest. His thumbnail sketches of important scientists are very entertaining, and are one of the books’ best features.

I didn’t spot any significant errors, and where informed opinion differs the author explains this openly, and usually in a very amusing way. He draws a clear contrast between the overweening "we know almost everything" of the late Victorians, to the acknowledged gaps in our knowledge a century later. As a result you get a very clear, balanced view of where we are now.

If you’re looking for step-by-step prose and big, clear pictures, look elsewhere. But if you want a walk through science with one of the masters of clear, concise and amusing verbal explanation, I can thoroughly recommend this book.

The book is very accessible, written and illustrated clearly and assuming very little initial knowledge. However it will also provide value to the experienced messaging developer, formalising his or her knowledge and suggesting new ways of using messaging to solve different problems. I particularly like the way that Hohpe and Woolfe lay out each pattern using language and visual styles to naturally delimit the sections of the pattern, rather than using lots of sub-headings. This increases the readability significantly.

Several books on patterns talk about a "pattern language", the idea of describing a complete design in terms of named patterns for the architectural form of each component. However this is one of the first books I have read which really adopt this idea – the authors have created a new visual language, which they first use to describe basic patterns in terms of basic message constructs, and then describe more complex patterns and solutions using the icons for the intermediate patterns. Best of all you can download a Visio stencil from the website and start using and extending the pattern language yourself.

The book is remarkably technology-agnostic, providing many examples in both .NET and Java forms, and with a fair sprinkling of other technologies, for example using proprietary EAI tools such as Tibco. I have certainly seen and used some of these patterns in older file-based integration schemes, and I suspect many of them work for Web Services too. As such the book has a much better claim to be a true "patterns" book than one wedded solely to a single technology base.

Each group of pattern descriptions is followed by a detailed "practical example" section which shows how one or more messaging technologies can implement the preceding patterns to solve real problems. There aren’t any real "antipatterns" in the book, but the book is realistic about when a given technology or pattern should not be used, which is just as valuable.

If I have a complaint it’s a minor one, that the book is too long. Including the multiple introductions, it runs to over 700 pages. Dipping in and out my read through has taken many months. Like many patterns books, in an attempt to keep each description self-contained you find by half-way through that some basic things are being repeated regularly. A more "normalised" structure might have been better. Also, although most of the book is very readable, a couple of chapters by "guest" authors, including the final one on Web Service standards, take a more academic tone.

That said, this is an excellent book, which can be read from cover to cover, or stands as a general-purpose reference, and I strongly recommend it.

It may be surprising where DeMarco & Lister start from, explaining what risk is, why we need to accept it and why we must manage it, but they explain how common attitudes in the IT industry, which they correctly term "pathologies", can make it almost impossible to properly acknowledge and manage risks.

Maybe it’s my background as a physicist, but I assumed that most project managers understand the concept of uncertainty in estimates of cost, timescale and benefits. The authors clearly start from the opposite position. This may be a little off-putting for some readers, but will definitely help those to whom this is a new concept, while the use of "uncertainty diagrams" (probability profiles) will be a useful addition to the toolkit even for those more familiar with the underlying ideas.

The book is very strong on how risk impacts budget and schedule, and how to more scientifically make goals and committed targets more realistic. There’s a very good discussion of how to assess deadlines using probability theory, which shows the folly of trying to manage large efforts by single deadlines. The book also includes a very good section on brainstorming and analysing different stakeholders’ "win" conditions to identify potential risks.

One weakness is the almost total lack of discussion of risk prevention – actively working to prevent a risk materialising, or at least to reduce its probability as well as mitigating its impact. For example they quote the example of an operating system upgrade which is incompatible with a "make or break" product development. Any sensible manager would work with the OS vendor and its developer information programmes to actively prevent this, rather than just worrying about its possible impact.

When it comes to combining the effects of multiple risks, the authors rely entirely on Monte-Carlo simulation and the "black box" outputs from a spreadsheet (which is downloadable from a web site for the book). This will be a useful tool, but a simple worked example showing the mathematical principles at work would be much better (see Combining Risks for my attempt at this).

The book is dismissive of time-constrained scheduling as "schedule flaw", and there is only limited consideration of methods such as Agile Modeling and eXtreme Programming which aim to mitigate or even prevent the effects of requirements change. However there is a good section on the use of incremental delivery to mitigate risk, but possibly somewhat unrealistic in relying on very complete requirements and design before the incremental delivery plan can be completed.

The approach to benefits, and the importance of properly assessing and measuring benefit is excellent. As DeMarco and Lister state, you can’t do any meaningful risk management or prioritisation unless costs and benefits are estimated, measured and controlled to almost exactly the same degree. Conversely, if you can build realistic models of both cost and benefit in risk terms, you have a very powerful but relatively simple model for project prioritisation.

Overall this is a good book which I can recommend, but not the definitive answer I expected from the authors of "Peopleware".

However, reading the book has prompted me to do some more research in this field. I’m currently looking at whether combining the core valuation equation with probability decision trees might be useful. I’ll post more when I have some results.

I was hoping for something which could help explain to business managers why processes such as IT delivery are uncertain, and the value of delivering flexible solutions. The initial part of the book makes a lot of strong qualitative statements of exactly the right sort:

• There is great value in breaking up large projects in uncertain markets
• Options (flexibility) create value out of uncertain events.
• Exit options which allow you to step away from a planned path, even if relatively expensive, may have significant value.
• An option such as an exit option, can make an investment viable when it would fail a traditional NPV test.
• Small speculative investments can enable larger investments to benefit from learning and to be much more accurately targeted.
• It may create greater value to start many projects and abandon more, rather than aiming to abandon a minimum number.

Unfortunately the remainder of the book then supports these statements only for a very limited set of circumstances. The Real Options approach only seems to work if the option can be translated into (or at least mapped onto) a tradeable financial security. There’s no real attempt to provide tools to evaluate internal uncertainty, such as the delivery uncertainty common in IT  projects, or the value of flexibility except where it maps to significant investment decisions.

The book does do a good job of explaining that real world situations are non-linear, with value which changes as a result of natural volatility, over time, and as a result of one or more decisions. Traditional NPV-based approaches greatly undervalue flexibility, insurance, learning and platform investments, and can’t really deal with this non-linear aspect. Simply increasing the investment discount rate, which is the usual way of dealing with such problems, doesn’t bring the correct focus onto uncertainty and total risk.

However, the mathematical basis for Real Option valuation is not well explained, and I found the processes difficult to follow. I suspect that the authors implicitly assumed a certain familiarity with economic and financial market techniques and terminology, which limits the value of this book to those seeking, as I was, to apply the techniques to other fields. It also left me puzzled as to why simpler approaches, such as Decision Tree techniques, can’t be used instead.

Surprisingly for a relatively short book the text is very repetitive, and too often turns into a blatant advert for the Real Options approach compared with others, rather than making the case on its own merits.

Hindsight is a great thing, but it is unfortunate that this book praises Enron as an example of success through options manipulation, where we now know this was largely a "long company" scam. Some of the other examples, quoted at the height of the Internet boom, have also not stood the test of time. However, these should not be seen as invalidating the approach, merely as evidence of how uncertain things may really be.

This book provides some good ideas, and if your focus is major business-critical financial transactions it may be very useful. But I’m still looking for a good book on how to generically value flexibility.

Have you ever wondered why flowers often have five petals, how bookies’ odds work, how you always end up in the slowest queue, or, indeed, why buses come in threes? If so, then this is the book for you.

In the course of a humorous, chatty discourse on the mysteries of life the authors introduce a number of branches of mathematics, including probability, topology, statistics and queuing theory, to name just a few.

To aid casual readers or those who’ve previously found the subject forbidding the maths is kept at a fairly simple level. However there’s still enough detail to be useful in other applications. I used this book as a reminder when trying to solve a problem related to software performance, and others who don’t exercise their maths every day might also find it a useful memory jogger.

Whether as an introduction if you’ve never enjoyed maths before, or a reminder if you have, I thoroughly recommend this book. I can also recommend the companion volume "How Long is a Piece of String?"

The messages of these books are that mathematics is important to everyday life, and that it’s fun. Have you ever wondered why flowers often have five petals, how bookies’ odds work, how you always end up in the slowest queue, or, indeed, why buses come in threes? If so, then this is the book for you.

Whether as an introduction if you’ve never enjoyed maths before, or a reminder if you have, I thoroughly recommend both books.

The answers, like before, lead us through a gentle, humorous exploration of mathematics and its relevance to everyday life. Along the way we explore (among others) geometric progression (why all pyramid schemes eventually fail), the geometry of stacking, fractals, chaos theory, the mathematics behind taxi meters, and various uses and abuses of statistics, both to detect and commit fraud.

The two messages of this book are that mathematics is important, and that it’s fun. It’s in the same vein as the work of Martin Gardener, but with a British slant.

To aid casual readers or those who’ve previously found the subject forbidding the maths is kept at a fairly simple level. Most of the time the concepts are communicated in words and simple graphs, but key equations are included and explained for completeness. The text is easy to read and the illustrations clear and amusing. Although aimed at those new to the enjoyment of maths, it’s also a good memory jogger for those with a bit more background.

I thoroughly recommend this book, and also the authors’ earlier volume.

George Gamow brought his original material up to date for "Mr Tompkins in Paperback" shortly before his death in 1968. However, since then Physics has moved on still further, and a new update was appropriate. Russell Stannard took on the challenge, and has done a superb job.

The new version brings both the science and the charming human back story fully up to date, and also addresses some inconsistencies in the earlier text and illustrations caused by their derivation from a group of separate magazine articles.

The books tackles all the main areas of modern Physics, from relativity to particle physics. Each topic is presented by both a serious (but straightforward) lecture text, and also by analogies in a dream experienced by one off the main characters. The two reinforce one another, and should leave the reader with a good basic understanding of all the key concepts. Familiarity with basic arithmetic and elementary concepts of classical physics are the only prerequisites, but the text should also be enjoyable for those with greater background knowledge.

I am very glad to see this classic developed for a new generation, and thoroughly recommend it.

The core of the book is a straightforward presentation of the known facts about global warming, its measured effects on the polar ice sheets, and how that may indirectly cause the failure of the Gulf Stream plunging much of the northern hemisphere into a much colder climate. Worryingly some early warning signs suggest that this may already be starting.

The book then presents a combination of scientific explanations and fictionalised accounts which suggest that such change might not be gradual, but might take the form of a protracted global storm of several weeks’ duration and unprecedented ferocity. If this happened in the summer the aftermath would be flooding of biblical proportions. If it happened during the winter it would plunge the world into another ice age.

The authors quote recent scientific evidence suggesting that exactly this happened towards the end of the last ice age, and suggest that the physical evidence is supported by this being an explanation for the biblical flood, a myth shared by many separate cultures.

If the book focused only on these areas it would deliver a clear, powerful message. Unfortunately the authors weaken their message somewhat by also trying to link in some pseudo-scientific stuff about a lost civilisation destroyed by the last such event sending us a message through the zodiac. This is based on the totally discredited ideas of people like Graham Hancock, and sadly taints what is otherwise a reasonable extension of current mainstream science with an unworthy "lunatic fringe" component.

It would have been better to structure the book starting with a very direct account of the proven science, leading into a well-marked extrapolation discussing the "superstorm" concept (using both factual and fictional elements), and ending with the excellent "what can we do" sections. All the pseudo-science rubbish should have been dumped. This would have created a work whose important ideas would have been much more widely appreciated.

I recommend this book, but encourage other readers to apply the filtering that the authors weren’t able to impose.

The book balances two quite separate elements. On the one hand there’s the story of how Sarah became interested in mathematics, did an interesting science project, and got a lot of attention when as a seventeen year old Irish girl she nearly invented a powerful new cryptographic system. On the other hand there’s a very clear introduction to the mathematics underlying modern cryptography, presented using a range of interesting examples, puzzles and clear explanations.

After an introduction to Sarah, her family, and the intellectual training methods of her parents, the first two thirds of the book focus mainly on the mathematical background, interspersed with regular anecdotes explaining how Sarah came to understand and use different skills and areas of knowledge.  If you want an introduction to this area of mathematics you could do a lot worse
than this book.

The last third of the book focuses on how she did her science project, and what happened when she won a major prize in the annual Irish Young Scientist competition, including how she and her family dealt with quite unexpected fame and media attention. What is interesting is how seriously the Irish establishment and media seem to take these things, and puts to shame the British indifference to this sort of achievement.

Finally a couple of appendixes present answers to the puzzles, and a few key pieces of mathematical background in more detail.

The book is co-written by Sarah’s father David. He’s a mathematics lecturer, and on the evidence of both the explanations in the book, and the way he inspired his children it appears he’s a very good one. Between the father’s very strong skills in presenting mathematics, and the daughter’s refreshing simplicity and honesty about all that’s happened to her, they make a very powerful team.

I would definitely recommend this book to any youngster interested in the sciences, or any sort of academic endeavour. I’d also recommend it to older readers, an encouraging proof that such interests have not been entirely abandoned.

If you’re going to write a thriller about cryptography, where the central characters are code makers and code breakers, then you have to have a passing understanding of the subject – Dan Brown clearly doesn’t.

For example, the author regularly gets confused between bits and bytes: you don’t need 64 characters for a 64-bit key – 16 are plenty and you might manage with 8. He also doesn’t seem to understand geometrical progression – if a computer can crack a 64-bit code in a few seconds a similar 128-bit code won’t take twice as long, it will take the same computer 2^64 times as long, or rather
longer than the age of the universe.

Factual errors aside, the characters are very two-dimensional. Apart from one cripple, twisted both physically and mentally, most of the other central characters are perfect specimens who could make a living as models if not employed at wonderful salaries by the NSA. There’s no room, for example, for a good guy who is talented, dedicated, and an eccentric insecure suppressed homosexual, like the real code-breaking genius Alan Turing.

Dan Brown is the master of great plots, and I thoroughly enjoyed the films of both “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons”. Unfortunately he doesn’t then flesh these plots out with decent writing or accurate details. On the strength of "Digital Fortress" I won’t be reading many of his books.

At the same time, the book provides a valuable introduction to a range of XML and e-Business technologies for those more familiar with traditional approaches. I found it answered a lot of questions I had about XML which had not been addressed by reading more typical “how to” books, so this book bridges the divide both ways.

The book starts out by setting out its aim – to bridge the XML and UML communities, and provides a high-level overview of both areas. It then focuses in on the key issue of e-Business integration, both as a common challenge and an area which will naturally affect both communities.

In subsequent chapters the author discusses defining a business vocabulary, and shows how an XML vocabulary can be modelled in UML, or generated from it. Having established this basis the author then discusses a number of XML-related standards, including XMI, XPath, XPointer, XLink, XML DTDs and Schemas, and XSLT, in each case using UML models to explain how the pieces fit together.

Finally, the last few chapters present an overall e-Business architecture based around the examples in the rest of the book, bringing all the pieces together in the context of Web Services.

It’s the curse of all technical writers and publishers that whatever you write is rapidly out of date, and this book suffers a little from that. Published in 2001 it views several key standards (such as XSD and core Web Service protocols) as “proposals”, and frequently omits details from examples because of this uncertainty. A reader would be well advised to supplement it with more up to date reading around the technical details.

That said, this book is well written, easy to read, and covers a niche which is still almost unoccupied. The companion web site backs the book up with some valuable material, including a free downloadable tool for XML modelling, generation and reverse-engineering.

I’d love David to do a second edition, moderately refreshed to present a 2004 view of the various standards and how they fit together. The core of the book wouldn’t have to change. Until that book turns up, I’m happy to recommend this one.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not in any way a bad book: it’s still as well written and humorous as Weinberg’s other books, and chock full of amusing stories and “laws” derived from them. Anyone involved in consulting of any sort will still get a great deal out of it. But if, like many men, you’re uncomfortable talking and reading about “feelings” you may find this less easy to read.

The “Consultant’s Tool Kit” of the subtitle is actually a complex metaphor. Each component of the toolkit is a metaphor for a certain aspect of your personality and personal capabilities. For example, the wishing wand is a metaphor for understanding, and being able to ask for, what you want from a professional relationship. The chapter around this metaphor first explores why most people either don’t know what they want or are unable to express it, and suggests ways to make your wishes clearer. It places this in a professional context, contract negotiation, and emphasises how the personal ability to express and value your wishes will help you negotiate more successfully.

In a similar way other chapters focus on developing wisdom and new knowledge, managing time and information, being courageous with your decisions, learning how to say yes and no, understanding why you and others are in the current situation, and keeping yourself in balance, avoiding burnout and other self-destructive conditions.

These are all important not only to consultants, but to anyone trying to establish a more satisfying professional or personal life by managing problems, by self-improvement and by better handling their relationships to other people.

Weinberg could have presented much of this material in a style much closer to the earlier book, but instead chose a more introspective approach which demands a greater investment on the part of the reader. Only time will tell how this investment is repaid, but I believe it will be for me.

That said, the main focus of the book is on those who produce the advice and ideas. If you are a consultant as I am, this may be one of the most important books in your collection. I have read it cover to cover twice, and parts of it many other times.

The book is written with a light, humorous touch, illustrated both with many funny stories and some very apt cartoons and quotations. From each discussion he abstracts multiple "laws" and reminders, which on their own should prompt you to remember the key points he discusses.

Weinberg doesn’t pull any of his punches. Consulting is hard, and the secrets are guides to improving your success and survival rate, not any set of "magic wands". He addresses ways in which you can fail just as much as ways to succeed.

In successive chapters, the book deals with the nature of consulting and the problems it can address, and how to develop your own mind so that your can see the problems and come up with possible solutions to them.

Throughout, Weinberg teaches us to focus on the "people" problems: cultural, political and psychological, which tend to be at the heart of any issue, assuming that, as he says, "it’s always a people problem". If you can solve the people problems, the practical problems should be easy by comparison.

In later chapters, the book focuses specifically on how to make consultancy more effective: how to improve the impact of what you do, how to help make change happen, and the importance of things like setting the right price and marketing yourself.

This is an easy book to read, with lots of good advice very humorously presented. I can thoroughly recommend it to all consultants, would-be consultants, clients and would-be clients.

The book covers five quite distinct topics:

• An introduction to business modeling and UML, explaining the problems the authors want to help solve, and describing each of the relevant techniques of UML,
• A proposal for a group of extensions to UML (using that language’s own established extensibility mechanisms) so that that it can better model business processes,
• A description of the variety of views and models which will be required to establish a comprehensive understanding of the business, or at least part of it,
• A repository of "business patterns", which you can use to model the business,
• A comprehensive worked example.

Each of these is quite detailed. In particular, the book contains probably the best introduction to the Object Constraint Language (OCL), and its use to model business rules, that I have read anywhere. The sections on how to do business modelling are also very good, as are the introductions to the relevant UML techniques.

The "Eriksson-Penker extensions for business modelling" are important because several UML-based case tools have now implemented them as an emerging standard for business process modelling with UML. If you want to fully understand how these work, this is the book to read.

The business patterns are more of a "curates egg". Some are extremely useful, and others innovative which could easily solve your problems where there is an accurate match. That said, some are less good and seem to state the obvious, although with patterns it is always difficult to know if you are judging some harshly simply because you are so familiar with them and other readers will get more value. Some of the pattern explanations are a bit repetitive, and the "examples" often sound very artificial, but overall they are useful, and a single one which solves a real business modelling problem for you will justify the rest.

At over 400 pages, some of which is occasionally slightly slow and ponderous this is not an ideal book to read from cover to cover. But it is definitely one to study, focusing on whichever topic is most relevant to you at any time, and I can happily recommend it.

Like those other books, it combines a sound set of standards for the experienced user with good guidance for those with less advanced skills. The focus is clearly on how to get the message across most efficiently and effectively, by understanding what you should leave out just as much as what you should include.

In just over 120 bite-sized pages Scott takes you through each of the main techniques in UML, identifying why you might want to use each one, how to draw the diagrams, how to construct names and descriptive text, with a number of clear "dos" and "don’ts" for each technique. It’s bang up to date, covering most of the new diagram types in UML 2.0 as well as the latest conventions for the more established diagram types. The writing and examples are concise, so that you can read much of the book at a single sitting, but always complete enough that you fully understand.

The book also teaches by example the tenets of Agile Modeling, the idea that models should be just good enough, no more than necessary, and that the set of models held and maintained by a project should be the minimum sufficient, so that the project can "travel light" and adapt easily to change.

This is not a book for the novice. It assumes you know the rudiments of UML, how and why you should be using it, although Scott does provide an extensive set of useful references to introductory and more detailed sources as required. Similarly although the Agile Modeling approach is introduced and demonstrated in some of the examples, you are going to have to read Scott’s more detailed books and articles to fully understand it.

Inevitably, by focusing on the example of "The Elements of Style" and what is absolutely necessary, some things have to be omitted. The book covers only the graphical elements of UML, not the textual elements which support them. I would like to have seen at least a standard Use Case template, but overall the decisions are very sound.

I suspect this book will become one of my main reference sources, since it covers much of what I need in daily modelling activities, in a format which makes it easy to carry around. You may decide the same.

The book is beautifully produced, in full colour throughout. This delivers the best of both worlds – clear colour illustrations which communicate most topics as well as good magazine articles, and a book structure which leads the reader progressively through each of Elements’ concepts and features. The text is well written, clear and concise without being repetitive.

Starting with an introductory chapter on digital imaging basics, each successive chapter takes the reader through a group of related features but these are arranged so that each chapter represents a step up in the sophistication of use. This will undoubtedly work well for many readers who want to assimilate skills at a given level before moving on. However, the short “feature summaries” scattered through the text are no substitute for either a real reference work or step-by-step “how to” guides.

If I have a complaint, it’s that the book brushes over some areas which are in great need of this sort of progressive, well-illustrated approach. Good examples are blending modes and filters. My only other real concern is that the discussions on poor practice are sometimes illustrated by examples where the
problem is so subtle that an unpracticed eye won’t be able to understand the issue, and more extreme examples might have be better. Personally I also found the “real life” examples at the end of each chapter a little simplistic and patronising, but they might work well for readers less familiar with the world of digital imaging, who are the main target audience for this book.

I definitely recommend this book, but be clear what it does and doesn’t give you. If you want “how to” articles, hints and tips then the current excellent crop of digital photography magazines is probably the best source. If you need reference material, this won’t necessarily be enough. But if you’re not sure what Elements does, why you might need it, or what the results should look like, then this is the book for you.

This review was based on the first edition (for Photoshop Elements version 1).

The book is based on the same material as the late 1990s TV series of the same name, and having watched that series many of the incidents and issues were familiar to me. The advantage of the book is the ability to digest information at your own speed and refer back to earlier pages, but it has to be said that the TV series communicated some of the issues better, helped by animated graphics and by the better mutual support of both pictures and narrative.

Each chapter takes a topic, whether a human factor like the law, a type of construction such as the dome, or a cause of failure such as metal fatigue, and then illustrates the issues by consideration of a number of case studies, frequently including some notable successes as well as dramatic failures. In the case of failures the book always attempts to assess both the practical cause, and also any human cause, impact and implications.

The book is very well written, in an accessible style supported by some useful appendixes on structural engineering principles. However, sometimes the simple line drawings and verbal descriptions of a structure don’t manage to communicate a full understanding, and more sophisticated illustrations might have helped.

Mario Salvadori died in 1997 (at the good age of 90), and the surviving author, Matthys Levy updated the book in 2002. My feelings on the update are mixed: the chapter on terrorism, culminating with the collapse of the New York Trade Centre towers on September 11th 2001 is excellent; but why did the author not acknowledge the brilliant success of efforts to stabilise the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the late 1990s?

Overall I heartily recommend this book to anyone with a serious or lay interest in structural engineering, and the many complex human and natural issues which influence it.

This is a practical book, who’s authors have realised that software architecture is about people and processes, not standards or definitions. Maybe it reflects the growing maturity of the field, but this book gets down to the meat in a way that most earlier books didn’t. The book includes some useful material for any architect trying to sell his efforts, particularly real business examples where major businesses succeeded or failed because of the quality and timing of architectural investments.

The book centres on the "VRAPS" model, five central principles which the authors believe are essential to achieving buy-in to an architectural or strategic initiative:

1. Vision: the creation of a clear view of future value, goals, structures and architectural constraints,
2. Rhythm: the idea of recurring and predictable exchange of architectural/strategic deliverables, 
3. Anticipation: the idea of predicting future change, and then validating and adapting the architecture as changes occur, 
4. Partnering: the creation and maintenance of clear cooperative roles, understanding and maximising the value ach receives and delivers, 
5. Simplification: the intelligent clarification and minimisation of both the architecture and the organisation.

The book presents the model in overview, and then in more detail. I particularly like the structure of the five central chapters: each describes one of the VRAPS principles in more detail, with three criteria for an organisation following the principle, three antipatterns which indicate common problems, and three patterns which support the criteria. This makes the book both readable and a good reference source, as it also includes references to other patterns and antipatterns in the same area.

Along the way, the book brings out some very important principles. For example, how organisation and architecture tend to reflect one another. A fragmented, political organisation will generate a diverse, complex architecture, and vice-versa. If you want to simplify your architecture then you need to pay attention to the complexity of the organisation behind it.

The book finishes up with an interesting "case study" of how the principles applied at Allaire, the Internet tools company, followed by the description of a "benchmarking" process where the authors explored architecture and organisation issues at other companies. This includes some very
useful templates, but you are left with the feeling that the sample size was very small, and (although the participants aren’t listed) was restricted to a few close business partners of Allaire. Whether the results of a wider survey would be similar is not discussed.

This is a very good book, easy to read, with a structure and reference sections which will make it easy to go back and re-read relevant information to a specific problem. It is a little specific to "product line" software architecture, and some of the advice needs translation into other contexts, but if you are involved with either software architecture or IT Strategy you will be well rewarded for reading it, and I would recommend it strongly.

The book clearly presents the VB.NET language, the new ASP architecture, how to develop using server-side and user controls, and supporting technologies such as Web Services and ADO.NET. However, there are some omissions. For example, the book states that you can’t raise standard events from User Controls, not only is this possible, but the standard MSDN documentation has a very simple example of how to do so.

If I have a major complaint, it’s that the book was not developed around Visual Studio. Instead the examples are mainly pure text, similar to old server pages. This has two drawbacks: it fails to support the new paradigm of web development which Microsoft have finally raised above hacking with a copy of notepad; and it’s sometimes difficult to relate the text-only examples to code generated by the Visual Studio design tools, and vice-versa.

Another weakness is shared with many other books on web-based development, especially in the Microsoft arena, with very little focus on how to properly structure code and solution components. I have had to resort to Java-based architectural pattern books, and I think there’s a major gap in the market here.

This won’t be the only book you’ll buy on .NET: I also purchased "VB.NET for Developers" by Franklin, and "the Visual Basic Programmer’s
Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library" by Powers & Snell, both in the same series from Sams. However, I can recommend it as a good clear introduction to ASP.NET, which doesn’t require you to read thousands of pages.

This book is a very welcome exception. This is how technical books should be written: no messing about, no unnecessary repetition, but all the material is covered clearly in about 250 pages. A very clear target audience (experienced VB6 developers), and clear objectives help – the book’s intention is clearly to communicate the essentials, and the practitioner will then get more detail from other sources. It’s one of the few books of its type which can be read from cover to cover.

The book isn’t perfect: I spotted a few proof-reading errors (in an early copy based on the Beta version of VS.NET); some examples are a little difficult to follow, and some topics inevitably rather sketchy.

However, I can thoroughly recommend this book, although I suggest that the serious VB developer will probably need other volumes as well: I also purchased "ASP.NET for Developers" by Amundsen & Litwin, and "The Visual Basic Programmer’s Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library" by Powers & Snell, both in the same series from Sams.

The early part of the book discusses the principles of component-based development (CBD), and how this can be combined with process modeling to both help improve the business, and to provide a clear model for the systems needed to support it. Importantly, Paul sees the development of both business processes and systems as something which must happen progressively, so neither has to be the subject of "big bang" changes.

The next section of the book discusses the different types of components, and their role in a typical architecture comprised of both new and legacy systems. Paul then introduces his "CBD Process Framework", a way of defining components and then "provisioning" then by the most appropriate combination of new development, purchasing and re-using existing assets.

The core of the book takes a typical business process (car rental) and develops a worked example of the various business, logical and physical models which are required to define the component architecture. The models are each taken through several stages, corresponding to an evolving e-Business process and a system which is growing incrementally. This is much more realistic than presenting the final model "as is", and allows much better understanding of how the model develops. In many ways this is the part of the book which delivers the greatest real value.

The final part of the book discusses different provisioning and funding strategies for CBD, and how an e-Business team should be structured.  There’s a lot of good stuff here, which may be very useful to someone new to object- and component-based development. However if I’m honest I found this less useful, since there are better specialist books on this subject and it doesn’t hold the interest as well as some of the earlier sections.

As an Appendix, Paul presents descriptions of all the major component technologies, and all the major UML-based modelling techniques. This could be a valuable reference for anyone.

I have one slight reservation on the book’s core – Paul follows a convention in which an "interface" is a collection of types, and says that "by convention" the interface includes access to all the types. This is a bit different to the Microsoft model, for example, and may make it more difficult to establish good navigation around the object model, or to support "stateless" models. However, this is something to be aware of rather than something which should detract from what is otherwise a very useful tutorial.

I like this book. The worked examples of developing the e-Business model are excellent, so much so that I now recommend this book to anyone trying to model such things using UML. 

He realises that this requires diagrams and analogies, since the mathematics is getting ever more forbidding. As a result, unlike a lot of books on modern Physics and cosmology, this one focuses on pictures and spatial representations. It’s beautifully illustrated throughout, almost a coffee-table book. That said, Hawking hasn’t neglected the text either – it’s clear, concise and frequently humourous.

The book starts with the key ideas developed in the earlier part of the 20th century, Relativity and Quantum Theory, but in the context of more recent experiments and observations, which makes it feel more contemporary than more historical accounts. The second chapter explains how these developed through to the 1980s, summarising the various attempts at unified "Theories of Everything". The book’s central chapter investigates what we now know about how the Universe formed and developed, presenting a lot of quite new findings and concepts.

After this, the going starts to get harder, introducing concepts like time travel through black holes, and the physics of the strangely-named "p-branes". You may need to read these several times, and understanding is by no means guaranteed, but Hawking rightly focuses on the key implications rather than the models themselves.

The penultimate chapter is a bit of a non-sequiteur, looking at the evolution of human and artificial intelligence. It’s a fascinating subject, well described and clearly of great interest to Hawking, but doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the book. Finally, the book presents some of the most recent ideas of unified theories – branes again – and makes some sense of why such strange mathematical models are needed.

I enjoyed this book, but I wouldn’t pretend to have understood it all on a first reading. However, I understood enough to be convinced that Hawking is not only one of our time’s great scientists but also, despite his disabilities, one of science’s great explainers. If you’re at all interested in modern Physics, I recommend this book.

The authors, themselves a husband and wife team, explain how most behavioral differences between the sexes can be explained by biological differences between men and women’s brains. In turn, these derive directly from millions of years of evolution to best fit traditional roles: "lunch chaser" and "nest defender". Political correctness is powerless to overturn things which are wired into our brains.

However, this is not a reactionary book seeking some scientific justification for an old-fashioned, discriminatory, political or religious agenda. Instead, the authors look at the reality of life since the late 20th century. They establish an explanation of problems in male-female interaction which we can all relate to. Then, where it’s possible, they identify strategies which each sex can adopt to better communicate and interact with the other. Not only does the book explain the difference between male and female sex drives, but it suggests strategies for getting more!

It’s a very well-written book, laced throughout with humour, including some very funny cartoons and quotations. Assertions about the differences between male and female brains are backed up by clear, modern scientific evidence, and several tests for the reader to try themselves. Once or twice I found the book a bit repetitive, especially in the section explaining gay behaviour, but I still read it from cover to cover in a few hours.

Everyone should read this book, but especially those who think that political correctness can wipe out the reality of who we are and how we think.

Despite the core subject, this is not really a book about cryptography, but about how to manage people and technology to solve complex, important problems. Welchman was the "glue" between the pure ideas men like Alan Turing, and the code-breaking production line.
His talents were clearly in building the organisation, and liaising between the different parties so that interception, decoding, understanding and using the intelligence became a repeatable success.

Welchman’s insights into British wartime society and bureaucracy are keen and frequently very humourous. Many of his insights are equally applicable today, in business as well as military circles. For example an individual’s promotion, prestige and salary should not depend solely on the number of subordinates.

Although he was very modest about it, it is clear that Welchman was no mean cryptologist himself. The book does attempt to explain several of the ways in which Enigma was cracked, but I found the primarily verbal explanations difficult to follow. However, this doesn’t prevent an understanding of the principals, and how different methods were applied at different points during the war.

The book does have some limitations. Because he was not personally involved, he explicitly refuses to discuss the effort focused on the German naval codes so important to the Battle of the Atlantic, and generally says little about the use of the intelligence information. Sadly, the current edition of the book omits much of Welchman’s advice on the analysis of battlefield communications, and how to keep such communications secure. However, one observation has been retained – it was a fundamental mistake to believe Enigma was secure simply because of the enormous computing power required for a brute-force attack. This should perhaps be noted in our Internet age, when so much depends on the assumed difficulty of factoring large numbers.

If I have a criticism of the book, it’s the rather poor production in places, with very faded photographs and occasionally blurred text. Figures are sometimes absent when they are most needed, e.g. when first explaining the Enigma machine. I read this book having only recently attended an excellent lecture and actually seeing an Enigma – otherwise I would have struggled at such points.

Nonetheless this is an excellent, insightful and inspiring book, containing a range of lessons relevant today, and I thoroughly recommend it.

I’ll be honest, I was really was looking for a book called something like "Enterprise Java for an Architect who knows a lot about Microsoft DNA but not much about Java". This is the closest I’ve found. It is a very good presentation of how the different elements of the J2EE stack are meant to
fit together, common problems and patterns which address them.

There are some very good things about this book. It really tries to explain the design forces which lead to good and bad solutions, and does try to put all the different patterns into the context of a "roadmap" so you can see how they link together. One of the best ideas in the book is actually in the epilogue, where the authors introduce the idea of building an architecture via a UML diagram built from stereotypes for the patterns. I can see this being widely adopted as a useful technique.

The big problem with the book is it is dreadfully repetitive. It’s not sure whether it’s a textbook, a reference book or a design tutorial, so it tries to be all three. The same text gets repeated over and over again, not only between sections but even within a section. By attempting to make each pattern, and each
"strategy" within a pattern self-sufficient there’s an awful lot of repeated text, sometimes even on one page. Some patterns almost exact copies of one another and should arguably be strategies for a single pattern. Text is often repeated between the "Problem", "Forces" and other
sections of the same pattern, where a better  trade-off would be references to a single list of more detailed descriptions. At the same time there are too many self-references in the text, even back to the start of the same section!

I found the repetition and overlap between the "design considerations", "bad practices" and "refactoring" sections confusing – it would be better if they all formed part of a single roadmap with the main set of patterns. There’s an established concept of "Anti-patterns", which could easily serve for bad practices and refactoring ideas, and these could also be reflected as part of the "forces" for the  patterns.

Adopting all of these patterns could lead to a very complex layer structure, with a great many classes involved in the simplest task. Several patterns seem to be about wrapping the complexities of J2EE, and you wonder whether there ought to be a more systematic solution to this. The book doesn’t discuss
"managing complexity in the design", but if it did it might come up with some simplifications.

While I’m not aware of an equivalent book with a Microsoft focus, with a little effort you could also apply many of these patterns in the Microsoft world. However, there are some good Visual Basic patterns books which show how this should have been written. A provocative idea – does the difference between this and equivalent VB books reflect the difference in productivity of the languages?

My advice? If you need a good J2EE design pattern reference buy this book, but don’t try to read it cover to cover.

The bulk of the book describes key people and events at first hand, and frequently surprises with a very different view to the common one. For example Hitler is portrayed as a bumbling amateur, but with an amazing personal ability to inspire and lead. The Allies’ victory was assured mainly by a catalogue of mistakes by the German leadership, some almost incredible. At the same time, Speer identifies several Allied mistakes which lengthened the war – for example failing to follow through and capitalize on the Dambuster raid, or those targeted at ball bearing production.

Although a long book, it’s well-written and easy to read, and I found it difficult to put down. Amazingly, given the writer and subject matter, there are even some humorous overtones. Related stories and incidents are grouped together rather than in a strict chronology – this takes a little getting used to. More disappointing is the absence of any diagrams or maps. Architecture was Speer’s key skill and Hitler’s abiding interest, and it is frustrating to read a lengthy description of their projects to be told "these plans survive", but not to be shown them.

A reader is likely to end up with some sympathy or even admiration for Speer. His successes as armaments minister early in the War were matched by humanitarian achievements as he led opposition to Hitler’s "scorched earth" policies during the War’s closing stages.

However, the reader must also consider some questions: History is written not necessarily by the victors, but certainly by the survivors. Is the fact that only the relatively decent Nazis survived to write their memoirs cause, effect, or the writers’ own self-advancement?

Similarly, there is little or no mention in the pre-war and mid-war sections of Nazi philosophy and Hitler’s own established hatreds – is this Speer trying to prove how little he knew about the war crimes and genocide?

This is an important book, revealing the other side of the Second World War. History may judge Albert Speer to be one of the few "decent" Nazis. His own book cannot do that alone, but it definitely deserves to be read.

Unfortunately, the other half of the book is less useful. The technical parts are either too simplistic, or too detailed when discussing a particular solution favoured by the authors. The text frequently tends to become a repetitive and thinly-disguised commercial for CORBA, and there is an obsession with standards such as RM-ODP which are simply not relevant to a great many commercial developers. The few examples are very simplistic, with no real discussion of many of the technical issues which a real architecture must address.

The book would have been much better for more care in its editing and presentation. The quality of proof-reading is in general poor, but becomes quite appalling in some of the technical sections – evidence perhaps that the authors allowed their technical stance to dictate a poor choice of word processor. The choice of diagrams seems random: some are good, but some difficult discussions cry out for a diagram (horizontal and vertical partitioning, for example), while in other places a diagram confuses where the text is clear. The reference list is incomplete, omitting even the authors’ "primary" reference which is quoted, frequently, in the text. All this is doubly disappointing when you consider that one of the authors is the series editor, and both were co-authors of the excellent "AntiPatterns" book.

My advice: if you are happy with the technological side of software architecture, and want advice on how to be a better architect, then buy this book, but read chapters 5 through 9 before you even attempt to read the first part. If, however, you are seeking technical guidance in the real world of software from Microsoft, Oracle and a host of legacy systems, then look elsewhere.

A lot of books about architecture concentrate on simple examples and small-scale problems, and you get the feeling that’s all the authors know about. Many books which do address large systems assume that you are building on a greenfield site, or can somehow ignore the legacies if you are adopting more modern tools for your new systems.

By contrast this is a book about the reality of mixed legacy and new technology environments, written by someone who clearly has real experience of large server farms, big databases, high transaction rates and, perhaps most importantly, important legacy systems with hundreds of thousands of lines of code written in COBOL . 

The book starts by discussing typical problems – things like adding new e-Business presentation layers to existing transactional legacy systems, and briefly summarises how a combination of good architectural practices and appropriate technologies can  address them.

The following chapters present a brief history of large system architectures, including transaction monitors, message queuing and client-server approaches before moving on to object middleware with a discussion on CORBA, Enterprise Java and COM and its relatives. This is followed by a more detailed discussion of how different parts of systems can communicate, and how middleware can be classified. A great strength of the book throughout is that Tony is not obviously partial in the Java vs. Microsoft debate, and instead concentrates on their similarities and on strategies which should be able to work in both cases.

The core of the book starts with a discussion on the different types of "transaction" between a system and its clients (users and other systems), and how these relate to business processes. The following chapters then look at three key issues within this context: resilience; performance and scalability; and security and systems management. In each case there is a clear statement of the problems and objectives, followed by an assessment of the relative merits of various possible architectural solutions.

The final part of the book presents a process which should lead to system architectures better able to meet their non-functional requirements. Tony believes the core of the process is development of a good business process model, which then leads quite directly to an understanding of the system’s components and their interactions. There’s some very good advice on practical implementation approaches, and why process modelling gives better results than
traditional functional analysis.

The final chapters also address key issues such as how to ensure data integrity and accessibility, and how to manage change through integration and designing for flexibility, before revisiting the process issues and summarising how the architecture should develop.

Published in 2000, this pre-dates Microsoft’s .NET initiative, the emergence of vendor-neutral messaging standards and the real advent of web services. Each of these will have a major impact on the sort of systems and issues discussed in this book, and you may therefore also  need to read some material more focused on these technologies and others, but that shouldn’t detract from this book’s value.

Overall this is an excellent book, and I strongly recommend it to anyone trying to understand the nature of large, integrated systems and their architecture.

I had hoped for a book dominated by a collection of patterns describing how users interact with technology, particularly computers. Instead the first 3/8 of the book is given over to an almost blow by blow account of each contribution to the development of patterns, their application to IT and finally to HCI. There is actually one important message, that patterns can aid communication not only between IT professionals, but also between professionals and users, as a way of describing both the problem domain and the proposed solution. However, this was almost buried in a detailed discussion of pattern format, which is much less
important.

I very nearly gave up reading at this point, which would have been a pity, since the central chapter of the book contains some interesting patterns, albeit of limited practical use. The "How to Play the Blues" pattern language is an entertaining demonstration of how to use patterns to describe a problem
domain, while the patterns for interactive exhibits are a good set of HCI patterns, although focusing on the interaction of regular users with business computer software would be of more general practical use. I also really liked the pattern layout, relying on typography and styles rather than headings to standardise the structure, which definitely enhanced readability.

Unfortunately the book does not sustain the interest, and after a single chapter on patterns returns to a strange and lengthy self-review, to the extent of reprinting the review comments the author received on a draft version. This is ridiculous.

The book’s malaise seems to be symptomatic of the whole discipline. The referenced web sites and books are not much better, with all but a few noble exceptions concentrating on academic discussions about patterns, rather than building a real pattern collection.

I am convinced that patterns can be really useful in the area of human-computer interaction and user interface design, just as they have been in many other areas of IT. I also think the arguments about style and format will be won by the author of the first good book that concentrates on building a comprehensive and readable set of useful real-world HCI patterns. This isn’t it.

Then the Internet happened, and suddenly we were put back 10 years. Everyone wanted "web based" systems, which had a some advantages, but one big disadvantage, Although such systems were superficially modern, with pretty colours and pictures, their models for the human-computer interface were mainly out of the dark ages of mainframe computing.

Richard’s book puts us back on track. He reminds us that we should be building software for people to use, and that if we get that wrong, most other considerations are secondary. He also has a clear vision of how systems should work, exposing the underlying object model to the users, so that they can directly manipulate a representation of their problem or task.

He starts by exploring the shortcomings of existing systems, and asking how a better interface would improve matters. He then develops a clear understanding of the characteristics of his "expressive" systems, as well as explaining why these are very different from capabilities like end user programming. Unusually, this is explained as a "business case" which business managers as well as IT specialists can understand. By doing so, we understand why this should be important to senior stakeholders, and not just something to keep the users and "techies" happy.

The next section of the book explains basic concepts of object-based and component-based systems, and explores why these are the basis for systems which put the user in control, in a problem-solving role.

Finally, the book discusses a range of design principles for expressive systems. Some of these are quite radical, such as "Don’t start by asking your customers what they want". A recurring theme is that IT may have to move beyond the limits of traditional requirements, which limit systems to very narrow definitions of both the problems and the system’s relationships to the business and the users.

This is a very readable book, designed to be read through in just a few sessions. Even this may leave you inspired, but the book is rich in both ideas and examples, and hopefully you’ll go back again to get more and more value from it.

Don’t expect a tutorial on the details of interface design. For this, read Alan Cooper’s "About Face" or one of Bruce Tognazzini’s books. Instead, use this book as a source of both inspiration and justification when you want to do more than traditional analysis and current fashions allow.

The book is beautifully presented, with most topics handled in a single two-page spread which makes it very easy to dip into. It’s richly illustrated, although some of the material originally from CSC’s "Foundation" research programme is not so strong. I’m proud to be a contributor in my own right, my ConQuest system making an appearance on page 63.

If you can get hold of it, the original paperback version is spectacular value for money. I haven’t seen the new hardback edition yet, but I expect it to be equally good.

I heartily recommend this book.