I can’t resist a bargain. Paying 60p for a book with a 1 pound sticker on the front does, I believe, constitute a bargain. The text, dating from 1990 is actually a pretty solid PL introduction and fairly comprehensive. It gives examples in mostly Pascal, Ada and ML. The coverage of OO illustrated with examples in Smalltalk and Prolog is used in the chapter on logic programming. Its interesting to reflect that at the time of writing OO hadn’t achieved the mass adoption it achieved in the later 90s and was still rather outside the mainstream.

I last read this when I was 12 or something. I think at the time I had been hoping for more of a James Bond spy novel type of thing rather than a crisply written satire about the British intelligence service and their willingness to believe stories however implausible. It also seems to be a meditation on the nature of storytelling. Nicely written and entertaining enough to keep me occupied on a long train journey,

I have always felt like I should read this collection of musings by Aurelius, who was the Roman Emperor between 161 and 180 AD. It is kind of a stoic self-help book — with lots of admonitions to follow your "inner self" and whatnot. There’s a mix of insight and self-centredness that feels oddly familiar to anyone who has read one of those "how to be a better person" tomes that litter our high street bookshops these days.

There has been a fair amount of excitement in the Haskell community about this comprehensive introduction to Haskell which the authors are writing "in the open" as it were. I felt like it was a good project so I ordered a copy of the book from the Haskell book site. I have skimmed the book and looked more in depth at some of the chapters, and can say that I am pretty impressed so far. The material is presented clearly and without recourse to the baffling mathsiness that characterizes much of the material in the Haskell community. It is clear that the authors are professional educators. I have also recently picked up the new edition of Graham Hutton’s "Programming Haskell", I think it will be interesting to compare and contrast Hutton’s approach to a similar space.