I offer you my first past-year booklist for fiction (1). I know these are just capsule summary-reviews, but I want to keep track of what I’ve read, lest I fall back into the bad habit of forgetting. I’ve limited this entry to non-graphical works (2). Books are sorted alphabetically by author, then publication date. Because […]
Tag Archives: books
Non-fiction books read in 2007 and beyond
Friday, 25 April 2008
For the longest time I wouldn’t read non-fiction books outside of work or school. “What is this non-fiction for pleasure you speak of?” The key wasn’t to follow what’s necessarily popular, best-sellers on history, politics, or purely goal-oriented how-to books. The key was to start with my gut-level (as it were) interests: food, travel, biology. […]
Books worth rereading
Sunday, 27 January 2008
Why bother rereading books at all? Isn’t it like, as Pink Floyd put it, merely “running over the same old ground,”(*) avoiding going forward or ignoring new stories? Nope, not at all! Reading a favorite book again is like eating one’s favorite comfort dish. Something to curl up with and savor. As exciting and satisfying […]
LibraryThing’s top unread books meme
Thursday, 4 October 2007
A couple of friends have posted responses to LibraryThing’s top unread books lists. Aha! I thought, a good way to write about books I have (or, er, haven’t) read. This is a popular blogging meme, yet none of the blogs (mostly on LiveJournal) include a link to the actual list —perhaps because it’s dynamically generated […]
JavaScript books
Wednesday, 24 January 2007
I’ve had earlier editions Flanagan’s JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly) sitting on my bookshelf for years. But I rarely cracked it open. When I did, I often became frustrated with not being able to find succinct or coherent information. Not too surprisingly, I rarely used JavaScript. Then came Jeremy Keith’s book on DOM scripting, and […]
Searching for a good PHP & MySQL book (Part 3)
Thursday, 7 December 2006
So I think I’ve finally found a good introductory book to read and keep on my bookshelf: PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy (Powers, Friends of Ed 2006). As the title implies, this book focuses primarily on PHP. However, the author does provide an introduction to MySQL and even a little bit on Apache. […]
Searching for a good PHP & MySQL book (Part 2)
Saturday, 18 November 2006
Continuing from the initial post on my search for a good PHP and MySQL book. As of this writing, though, I’m still a-searchin’… :-\
Searching for a good PHP & MySQL book (Part 1)
Friday, 10 November 2006
So far I’ve been more or less disappointed with the PHP and MySQL books I’ve glanced through. I try to read at least a few dozen pages in each to get an idea of the writing style and coverage. Perhaps it might be best to get separate books on PHP and MySQL? That’d be a […]
Old 2-bit book reviews
Sunday, 30 July 2000
From (roughly) 1998 through 2000 I wrote a bunch of short book reviews. Most are rather terse, some ranting. Other than correcting typos and markup, I’ve kept them as is for history. Which may be useful as newer editions come out, and as opinions and technologies change and evolve. A long list below…