Charlie Harvey

December 2013 reading

  • Functional Programming Patterns in Scala and Clojure, by Michael Bevilacqua-Linn

    When I was first learning Java there was a big trend towards using design patterns. The extreme edge of that trend was critiqued wonderfully by Mark Jason Dominus in Why Design Patterns Aren’t. But I digress.

    The book looks at some of the more popular OO patterns and how you might solve the same problem using functional techniques in Clojure or Scala. Sometimes the problems simply go away and sometimes higher order functions make it trivial to build soething more elegant and maintainable than would OO. It is interesting to see how languages approach the same problem in sometimes very different and sometimes very similar ways.

    2013-12-16 by Charlie Harvey
  • Jack Glass, by Adam Roberts

    Skirting the borders between horror, mystery, and sci-fi this is a darkly disturbing story of an intergalactic serial killer. And I mean really dark, though Roberts’ writing is so well crafted that even acts of hideous ultraviolence acquire a poetic patina.

    2013-12-16 by Charlie Harvey
  • Design is a Job, by Mike Monteiro

    This would be a great book if you were starting out as a freelance designer. I’m not — I just picked it up from the newint book shelf. But it is short enough and well written enough that I read it through to the end anyway. Will recommend it to design colleagues.

    2013-12-01 by Charlie Harvey
  • Bandit Algorithms for Website Optimization, by John Myles Whyte

    The book combines short introduction to the situations in which you may want to use multi-armed bandit approaches to optimizing your site content, rather than A/B testing options with a dicussion of 3 popular algorithims for solving the problems. There are some excercises and a bit of discussion on how to use these approaches in the wild. A great short introduction.

    2013-12-01 by Charlie Harvey


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