Recently in Books Category

I know in the past we've talked about getting stuff done... I'm excited that the 37signals book is available online now to read for free!

Getting Real

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.
Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features, less paperwork, less of everything that's not essential (and most of what you think is essential actually isn't).

I think this a good companion to the book the former Microsoft manager Scott Berkun wrote on getting stuff out the door:
The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun

I suggest you take a look at the Getting Real site when you have a minute, it has a lot of great ideas on agile development and innovating processes that step outside the conventional box.

Shaping Things

Ordered this! Looks like a fun insightful read.

Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of "gizmos." New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object -- we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable -- that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable. Sterling coins the term "spime" for them, these future manufactured objects with informational support so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means, and precisely tracked through space and time. They are made of substances that can be folded back into the production stream of future spimes, challenging all of us to become involved in their production. Spimes are coming, says Sterling. We will need these objects in order to live; we won't be able to surrender their advantages without awful consequences.

Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9780262693264
ISBN: 0262693267
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 144
Publication Date: September 01, 2005
Publisher: The MIT Press

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

The subject of this book is motion and the mathematical tools used to describe it.

Centuries of careful observations of the motions of the planets revealed regularities in those motions, allowing accurate predictions of phenomena such as eclipses and conjunctions. The effort to formulate these regularities and ultimately to understand them led to the development of mathematics and to the discovery that mathematics could be effectively used to describe aspects of the physical world. That mathematics can be used to describe natural phenomena is a remarkable fact.

A pin thrown by a juggler takes a rather predictable path and rotates in a rather predictable way. In fact, the skill of juggling depends crucially on this predictability. It is also a remarkable discovery that the same mathematical tools used to describe the motions of the planets can be used to describe the motion of the juggling pin.

Classical mechanics describes the motion of a system of particles, subject to forces describing their interactions. Complex physical objects, such as juggling pins, can be modeled as myriad particles with fixed spatial relationships maintained by stiff forces of interaction.

Amazon.com : Best Books of 2004

Best Books of 2004 Top 10 Editors' Picks: Computers & Internet

update... I put this on my page so I wouldn't have to go looking... found on
found on
slashdot

the video editing book drew me back... hmmmm

encyclopedia
Bruce pointed this out.

The best encyclopedia ever written was published over 90 years ago! And now you can find right here on the web! This 1911 encyclopedia is filled with historical information that is still relevant today.

It fills 29 volumes and contains over 44 million words. The articles are written by more than 1500 authors within their various fields of expertise. As a research tool, this 1911 encyclopedia edition is unparalleled-- even today.

IBM Redbooks | Just Published

This is a page that lists recent IBM Redbooks. If you aren't familiar with Redbooks check it out, a lot of the Info is IBM product specific, but some cover standards and applications such as the Networking series. Or loading GNU/Linux Clusters.

CMD | Command Prompt, Inc. | Practical PostgreSQL

Found mention of two PostgreSQL books.

Practical PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL: Introduction and Concepts by Bruce Momjian