Recent Reading List

James Avery posted up a list of his recent books. I added mine to his comment section, then realized "Dude, you run a blog and should post this there." Duh. Fiction * Scalzi's Old Man's War. Great sci-fi on the costs of war. * Tolkein's The Hobbit. Hadn't read it in many, many years and wanted to refresh after seeing Jackson's extended set of LOTR. Non-Fiction * Littman's The Watchman about cracker Kevin Poulsen. Makes me even more paranoid about all the security crap I still don't know. Makes me want to unplug everything from my house and live like the guy in Varley's short story "Press Enter". * Jimmy Carter's An Hour Before Daylight. I have nothing but vitrol for Carter's career as President and his post-presidency's idiotic, harmful meddling as an "election monitor". I needed to try and get some balance in my view of him since I have great respect for his work with Habitat for Humanity. This book's done great wonders for helping the balance, but my opinion of his horrid semi-professional involvement in the world hasn't changed. Geek Books * Microsoft's MCAD/MCSD Self-Paced Training Kit, coupled with Que's Exam Cram MCSD series. Both are helpful study guides, although I'm generally down on Que products. * Thompson & Thompson's Building the Perfect PC. Whee! Fun stuff. Convinced me to get off the fence and put my own system together from parts. * Just started: Wagner's Effective C#. 50 points to make your C# better. I'm only up to point four and I'm blown away. Wagner's prose may strike some as brusque, but the content is killer. Detailed text breaking down each point with great justification why you should write your code this way. Dave Donaldson would like this book because Wagner also goes into Intermediate Language (IL) from time to time. Heh.