Latest Reading List

It’s been quiet with blog posts this last week, but hey, it was Christmas so give me a break!

Here are a few things off of my reading list this last month:

Tech Stuff

Bauer’s and King’s Hibernate In Action.  I’ve been doing a modest amount of work with NHibernate and this book is often referenced in the NHib community.  It’s a great book for Object/Relational Mapping concepts, and NHibernate is a pretty close port of Java’s Hibernate so things seem to clearly map over so far — at least in the first quarter of the book I’ve read so far.

Troelsen’s Pro C# 2005 and the .NET 2.0 Platform, Third Edition.   A bit too wordy, and definitely not targeted at graduate students as he says on the back cover — the material’s deep, but also starts out at the introductory level.  Despite the wordiness, it’s a terrific read with great details on a lot of different topics.  He is the first author who has made a clear case why going into IL is a Good Thing.  (On a side note, how can it be the third edition for the .NET 2.0 platform??)

DeMarco’s & Lister’s Peopleware.  Published something like 20 years ago and it amazes me how little management has learned about how to feed and nourish creative tech staff.  The same mistakes are being made now as two decades ago.  Read this book if you’re interested in how to set up a productive environment for your staff, or if you need ammunition to convince your management on how to do things the right way.

Liberty’s Programming ASP.NET , 3rd Ed.  Lots of shiny stuff on doing ASP.NET well.  Not even close to a reference for all the goodness in v2.0 of ASP.NET, but there’s a tremendous amount of goodness therein.  My primary source for learning ASP.NET.

Fiction

DeCandido’s novelization of Serenity.  What a piece of ghosa. By far the worst novelization I’ve ever read.  DeCandido tries to write in the folksy manner that Joss Whedon’s characters speak in — and fails miserably.  It’s clunky, schizophrenic, and scattered.  DeCandido even manages to foul up the gobs of one-liners Whedon had in the movie.  Inept treatment of terrific material.

King’s and Straub’s Black House.  The usual over-long King story, although Straub appears to have kept him somewhat in check.  Some interesting concepts and neat writing style.  Got this as a gift, so the price was right.

Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.  Toungue-in-cheek book about the beasts of Harry Potter’s world — cast as a schoolbook, complete with margin scribblings from Harry, Ron, and Hermione.

Mignola’s Hellboy Volume 1: Seeds of Destruction.  I love the movie Hellboy, but got hooked on it without having read any of Mignola’s work.  This graphic novel is just stunning.  Amazing colors, amazing art, amazing story, and quite different character interactions than how things go in Del Toro’s movie universe.  I’m happy, happy, happy I got this as a gift!

Non-Fiction

Kimmel’s Grace-Based Parenting.  Sensible, funny, calm writings on how to raise kids who are strong enough to stand up to the many problems they’ll face as they grow from brats I mean young children through teens to adulthood.  It’s written from a Christian standpoint, but there’s a lot to appeal to any parent (or potential parent) regardless of your religious beliefs.  I like that Kimmel comes from the viewpoint that overprotection is a patently Bad Thing, and that extremism in any area of parenting is a recipe for raising children who will head off on destructive paths.  It’s sort of like a kinder, gentler Rosemond before Rosemond went completely psycho.