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Sep 10 2005 / Aaron

More words ingested

Ahh, and now it’s time for your regularly scheduled book-blog. Here’s what I’ve chewed through recently:

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
The follow-up to Ender’s Game. I’m continuing to catch up on some classics. I enjoyed this a fair bit. The speaking was great. I liked the underlying theme about the importance of compassion and understanding things from another’s point of view.
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
I find myself at work, more and more in the role of managing than coding, as our team has grown and I’m in a senior positon. In effort to brush up on my management skills I’ve picked up a few good books on software engineering and business. I’ve started my home schooling with this classic of the genre. It was first published in 1975. It’s amazing that despite how much the computer industry has transformed since then, that the book is still relevant.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Another great Vonnegut novel. My enjoyment of this one was hampered by my having seen the movie first. The movie
was quite true to the book, which made it all the more difficult to get the movie out of my head while reading the book. And so it goes…
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut is always a fun read. This was no exception. As far as made-up religions go, Bokonism it pretty kick-ass.

One Comment

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  1. deep book / Sep 12 2005

    Brooks’ MMM is timeless because it focuses on *people*, not computers. Despite what they might believe, developers are people.

    Now if managers were people, a whole lot more could get done…

    KV r00lz. You’ve now read the top three though (with BoC), so I have no strong recommendation for the next. For you, maybe "Galapagos", since it features farting 10000 years into the future…

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