The End Of Faith - Sam Harris

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

Breaking the Spell - Daniel Dennett

[Update: I started to get a bit lost, as I was reading it without a computer next to me, so I went back and decided to start at the calculator again, this time porting his code over to C#. I'm doing it TDD, which is helping a lot, especially since I'm actually taking the stance of treating his methods as black boxes, sending some inputs in, then seeing what comes out. These end up as the tests for my own code. I've finished porting his simple expression tokenizer, now onto the parser. I took a look at my code, then his code, and I noticed that he is using a lot of old VB stuff (such as Instr and Mid), which mine doesn't. Personally, I like my code a bit better, seems a little cleaner. Somehow, I ended up with it being able to support alternate operators, as well, with only an addition of one line of code (wrote the operator lookup as a hashtable). It still only supports single-character operators, though. I could make a small change to fix that, but I don't think I will.

So far, so good, the book is still keeping me interested.]

Well, I got a new book today that I'm eager to get into.

Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler

I read the intro, and he already has impressed me with a quote from his introduction. The examples are in VB.Net, and he asks why not C#:

“Why not C#? I didn't choose C# because of a simple theory of mine. All, or nearly all, C# programmers know Visual Basic, but not all Visual Basic programmers have made the transition to C#.“

This is a great quote from someone writing a book on compilers, and it really struck me. I'm a C# guy to the bone, but I still think it is important to realize that there are tons of VB people still out there.

[Update: Chapter 3, A Compiler Flyover]

This chapter really went into BNF grammars and created one for a simple integer calculator. The BNF was then translated into a parser and interpreter for the calculator. It is very cool, and I can see how you would go about building something simple like this. It is a very brute-force way of parsing the tree (basically using a bunch of Mid statements), and I think it would be very tedious on a larger grammar. The book's eventual goal is a quickbasic parser, which will be very cool.

A comment about VB.Net. I've seen some ex-VB people asking to have the With statement added to C#, so we could write something like the following:

with myObjectVariable
{
.property = newValue;
}

Edward uses this quite often in the code, and I find that I am very glad it isn't in C#. The first time I saw it, I was a bit taken aback, but then I remembered With. UGH! What a nasty piece of syntax. Yeah, it does cut down on typing, but isn't that what Ctrl-Space is for?

In any case, I stepped through the code (downloaded from APress) of the calculator, and it is very neat. The first read-over of the chapter was a bit confusing, but having the code definitely helped.

So far, so good. If the rest of the book keeps up with the quality of the writing so far, this will be a definite recommendation for people.

Well, Buy.com finally got me with an offer, and I upgraded from my Lexar Jump Drive Sport  from 256M to 1G. After rebate, it will be $49.99. That is just too good to pass up. I use this a lot, and actually have filled up the 256M before. I like to keep pictures on it for showing to people on a whim. Very nice.

Of course, as long as I was buying something, I went ahead and got The Complete Far Side and Just A Geek. I'm really looking forward to Just A Geek, and, of course, I don't have to mention how awesome the far side is.

I was reading Rachel Davies' blog, and she mentions, in passing, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” This is a great book, and I read it when I was 19. It definitely changed the way I approached my tasks in life, and I think it is high time to read it again, as it definitely has a lot of links to Agile development. I'll have to find my copy and break into it again. This should be, I think, required reading for agile developers.

Word rapidly spread through the office that the local Microcenter was having a huge book sale blowout, selling such great titles as ASP.Net in a nutshell and C# in a nutshell for 4.99. So, after work, I trooped down there and took a look. Unfortunately, my impatience got the best of me on this particular evening, so I only saw one table to discount books. I ended up with the following list:

• ASP.Net in a nutshell
• Troubleshooting SQL
• HTTP pocket reference

Plus, they had a switch that was free after rebates, so I picked it up; now to remember to send the rebate form in. Some friends and I get together semi-regularly (and once Dave finishes up his training, more regularly) to play ages of empires II on my lan. I usually disconnect my router upstairs and bring it down for us (one of the laptops doesn't have a wireless card, so we can't rely on that), and I can't seem to find my old router. Now, though, I can just plug this switch in and all the machine will be hard-wired. Plus, if I plug a hub into one of the ports, it will detect it and make that port an uplink, so I can expand on the crazy off chance that I end up with a bunch of people over at my house playing.

I've started reading the Troubleshooting SQL, and it seems okay, so far. Here's my favorite line, so far:

“No one in their right mind will let you experiment on a production database server in this fashion. First, crashing the server, a realistic possibility while troubleshooting, is not popular among those who need to provide data on a 24x7 basis.”

Anybody remember Tales of the Beanworld? I loved this comic when I was a kid. I remember thinking they were so cool, then the series just ended. I think I'll get them again.

[Update: Man, just a couple minutes later, and I can't think of anything else. I must get them again. I remember loving them so much. It was so odd for a kid my age (probably around 12, or so?). It wasn't men bit by spiders, no robots that turned into cars or had huge screws on their chests, just some crazy beans eating chow.]

[Update: I did a search on amazon, and it looks like I can get them at Wonderworld Books. Talk about a small world. That's in Seattle, and I used to hang out there when I was a kid.]

I just started a new book from my library booksale bag, “Second Trip,” by Robert Silverberg. The premise is that, in the future, we have the technology to wipe someone's personality and whole mind from their brain, then, rather than wasting a perfectly good body, we can construct a new person in the same brain, basically adding memories and everything. This is something that is normal to be done for criminals and other people who seem to need it (perhaps the insane?). The story revolves around one guy who has had this happen to him. Unfortunately, he runs into someone from his previous life or “trip,” then starts having flashes from this first “trip.” I haven't got too far into it, though, so I don't have a concrete feeling about it.

It certainly didn't start anything like “The Man Who Folded Himself,” meaning I didn't get immediately hooked for any other reason than I was reading, which is something I love to do.

I have found one of the most awesomest books! It is so good that it forces me to use poor grammar to describe it. Fantabulous! And made up words. “The Man Who Folded Himself“ by David Gerrold.

I referenced it in my Point of No Return post, but this book just keeps getting better. I haven't really had a book in a while that made me spend so much time thinking about finding a corner to hide in, so I could read this book. I'm not quite done with it, so I'm hoping that the ending won't disappoint, as  it could potentially become one of my favorite books ever! On par with Ender's Game.

And one of the best parts of this book is that I got it at a library sale for a trivial amount of money. They were selling paper bags of books for $2. Any and all the books you could fit into the bag were yours for two bucks! Almost better than when you could get pizza hut pizzas for two bucks, two bucks, two bucks! I didn't even have to buy a book at regular price!

He also wrote the Chtorr Wars, which I got at the library sale. It looked a little cheesy, but now I am excited to read it. Plus, the book is huge, so I'm going to really enjoy it.

Wil Wheaton had a great entry about reading a book and reaching the Point of No Return, basically the idea that there is a certain point in a book when you are totally sucked in and can't think of anything else except finding out what is going to happen. I thought about it, but couldn't remember exactly on any old books what that point was. However, I just started a new book, The Man Who Folded Himself, and I hit it.

It was very early in the book when Danny's Uncle Jim visits him and tells him that he (Danny) is worth 143 million dollars. Danny is currently receiving $400 a week from a trust fund, but Uncle Jim is going to up it to $1000. In exchange, all he asks is that Danny keep diary and write in it every day, or at least once a week. At that point, I was hooked. Why would he want to do that. I already knew the book was about time travel, so I could see some interesting results of keeping a diary.

I started this at the beginning of my lunch, and I'm now at page 53, lamenting that I can't read for the rest of the afternoon. Doh!