-
I have never read much Woolf and always thought I ought to. I found her essay, which looks at what it means to be a woman who makes art was a lot more accessible than I had been led to believe her writing would be. She does take a rather circuitious route to make the point sometimes, but that’s OK when you are sitting in the garden in the sunshine. The essay is also fascinating historically — I found it amazing how far society has evolved in its treatment of women in some ways, and disturbing how little has changed in others.
-
Surprisingly given how influential it is, it has taken me this long to get round to reading Fowler’s classic. It presents a catalogue of common refactoring wrapped in some material about the importance and usefulness of refactoring as a practice. It embraces the late-90s technique of presenting material as a pattern catalogue which works reasonably well for the examples presented, but starts to show its limitations when discussing "big refactorings" later on in the book. Nevertheless an excellent reference, and I learned a lot from it.
-
I found that the book concentrated rather too much on the French Left, so a lot of it was over my head. Nevertheless, the critique of how the post-May 68 left intellectuals have come to an empty critique of power nominally in the name of the working class is solid.
-
Another little book, this time an intro level scheme book. I’m writing an implementation of Scheme at the moment, and partially reading rounbd the subject. I would say this was a little too introductory, but sort of charming. It gives a reasonable into to thinking recursively, but I found the novelty of its question and answer style presentation wore rather thin after a couple of chapters.
-
I love short books, especially short tech books! In fewer than 30 pages, Karl manages to cover the bare minimum you need to know to put Redis to work. Great stuff.