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April 23
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Steve
gave
 
to:
Eat, Drink & Be Hairy: The Travels & Travails of Yosemite's Bears & Their Peculiar Pals (Paperback)
by Phil Frank
bookshelves:
fun-nonfiction
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in April, 2008
Steve said:
"Not really nonfiction, but that's closer than anything else. A collection of daily strips of the comic "Farley", all having something related (sometimes very loosely ;) to Yosemite.
Great fun!
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April 04
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Steve
gave
to:
Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks (Paperback)
by Brian Jepson
bookshelves:
technical
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended for: Unix Wise Ones moving to Mac OS
read in April, 2008
Steve said:
"I got this book because it was $3 and O'Reilly doesn't seem to have an updated version coming out anytime soon, so I might as well use SOMETHING. This book is a very weird amalgam of parts: I wanted information as a Unix Geek *User*, but a lot of the...more
I got this book because it was $3 and O'Reilly doesn't seem to have an updated version coming out anytime soon, so I might as well use SOMETHING. This book is a very weird amalgam of parts: I wanted information as a Unix Geek *User*, but a lot of the information in here is geared towards the Unix Geek *Developer*: there's a ton of information in here on package formats and the like, which is great if you're porting applications, but 99% of the time, I'm not.
What I was hoping for was a book that told me about the "weirdnesses" compared to, say, a "standard" Linux distribution ("vm_stat" vs "memstat", for example) and/or the command-line goodies (like Spotlight). And you definitely get some of that, although Leopard (10.5) is pretty dramatically different from Tiger (10.4), so a significant amount of information is out-of-date (no QuickLook, NetInfo is dead, X11 is noticeably different, etc). But I don't have any better understanding of, say, 'scutil' or 'pmset' (or the bigger framework that they fit into) than when I picked up the book. Which is a shame.
I have to agree with the other big criticism of the book that I've run across, which is that if you already know what item Z is, then this book does a good job of explaining it to you, but if you don't know it, it's not so good.
I guess I really wanted something for a user in-between n00b and wizened guru, and this book wasn't it....less
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March 19
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Steve
gave
to:
Olympos (Mass Market Paperback)
by Dan Simmons
bookshelves:
fiction
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended for: people who compulsively finish series
read in February, 2008
Steve said:
"Olympos is the conclusion to the story started in Ilium. It ties up a lot of loose ends, fills out the backstory, and tells the continuing story of the Trojan War and the Greek gods as well as man...more
Olympos is the conclusion to the story started in Ilium. It ties up a lot of loose ends, fills out the backstory, and tells the continuing story of the Trojan War and the Greek gods as well as many others.
I had a long review written explaining my rating, but it boils down to this: I couldn't put Ilium down. By the time I was halfway through, I was sneaking time at work and staying up until my eyes were bleary to see what happened next.
Olympos? Well, I worked on it here and there, and plugged away until I was finished. I can't say that it was boring, or that it was so awful that I wanted to throw the book away, but I read Ilium,Ilium is a favorite book of mine, and Olympos is no Ilium.
...less
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March 16
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New comment on eireann's review of
Ringworld
reply to this comment
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Steve
gave
to:
Ringworld (Paperback)
by Larry Niven
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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March 10
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Steve
gave
to:
Fifty Degrees Below (Mass Market Paperback)
by Kim Stanley Robinson
bookshelves:
fiction
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in April, 2008
Steve said:
"The problem with Important books is often that they're not very Good. And Fifty Degrees Below tries very, very hard to be Important.
In the wake of the devastating flood that ended Forty Signs of Rain, globa...more
The problem with Important books is often that they're not very Good. And Fifty Degrees Below tries very, very hard to be Important.
In the wake of the devastating flood that ended Forty Signs of Rain, global warming has stalled the Gulf Stream and ironically brought about global cooling: a winter that makes Washington D.C. feel like International Falls, Minnesota. Meanwhile, the Administration denies that anything is wrong and works to subvert science and the electorate.
Forty Signs of Rain took a stand about global warming and American intransigence at doing anything about it. Fifty Degrees Below is a polemic. The world it presents is so close to our own that you can't disregard all of the left's tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories: the dim-witted but folksy President run by the oil companies (ok that's more fact than theory), the rigged voting machines, superblack intelligence agencies "chipping" people and objects for
large-scale ongoing surveillance. The ... paranoia... is such that I can't maintain suspension of disbelief. And I mostly agree with Robinson -- but it's just too much. Add in the "coincidence" of Our Hero's random-encounter girlfriend be the person who can tell him all about the fact that he's being watched by Homeland Security's automated 'terrorism futures market' and who knows about plans to rig elections, and this book is way over the edge.
I finished the book, but it didn't really even have the drama of Forty Signs of Rain's climax. There's a third book in the trilogy, and I might read it. Or I might not.
If you want to learn about climate change, check out the Web. If you want an exciting fast-paced climate thriller, The Day After Tomorrow was no less ludicrous and had a lot more eye candy. If you want a good read, go elsewhere.
...less
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March 06
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Steve
gave
to:
The Left Hand of Darkness (Paperback)
by Ursula K. LeGuin
bookshelves:
fiction
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended for: people who like to think
read in February, 1994
Steve said:
"This is one of my all-time favorite books. It combines a thought experiment -- what if humans weren't always gendered, and how would that change us? -- and a rollicking good story.
The gist of the background is that at some point in the past, hum...more
This is one of my all-time favorite books. It combines a thought experiment -- what if humans weren't always gendered, and how would that change us? -- and a rollicking good story.
The gist of the background is that at some point in the past, humanity was seeded throughout the galaxy by an ancient race, and it was not until "recently" that the worlds of Man have come together again -- and we are still finding lost brothers and sisters in the void. One of these worlds is Gethen, also known as "Winter", which is a world that has human civilization surviving an Ice Age. But even more interesting than the world are the people who live on it: the people of Gethen are periodically hermaphroditic; 5/6 of the time they are completely genderless and then they go into heat (kemmer), during which they can either assume male or female roles -- so the average Gethenian can be both father and mother to a number of children. Genly Ai is the Earth human (male) who is serving as an ambassador from the other worlds of humanity, to see if the Gethenians want to rejoin their extended family.
LeGuin uses this setting to ask the obvious questions: what would people who are normally genderless be like? What kind of world and societies would they build?... but it's also a great story. The struggles of being different and the ability of people to disregard or downplay the evidence in front of them, to take the remarkable and use it for their own petty ends -- these are the struggles of Genly Ai as he tries to convince the Gethenians that there is a larger world out there and that it would welcome them. His efforts form the narrative backbone of the book even as the fundamental weirdness of the Gethenians makes you think on every page.
I can't recommend this highly enough....less
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Steve
gave
to:
Forty Signs of Rain (Mass Market Paperback)
by Kim Stanley Robinson
bookshelves:
fiction
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended for: KSR fans,
read in March, 2008
Steve said:
"Many reivews cite Ilium as "literary science fiction" but Kim Stanley Robinson is the real deal. His epic speculative fiction is de...more
Many reivews cite Ilium as "literary science fiction" but Kim Stanley Robinson is the real deal. His epic speculative fiction is dense, character-driven writing on remarkable topics. (This is not to disparage Ilium, which is a feat of imagination and plotting -- but
literary it ain't.) There is considerable plotting and imagination within Robinson's books, but it rapidly fades into the background as "just the way things are," and the characters and their journeys become the focus of your attention.
Forty Signs of Rain is the beginning of a trilogy (Robinson often writes in threes) about global climate change, and it's as much "fiction about science" as it is "science fiction" -- most of the action takes place in bureaucratic offices and processes. I can't say that listening to a grant review panel is any more fun in fiction than it is in person, but it is at least shorter.
The downside of Robinson's dense writing and imagination-as-background is that unless the background is truly amazing and a radically different world (like in Antarctica or the Mars trilogy), it's hard to transition into the world he presents. This is particularly noticable with Forty Signs of Rain where much of the action takes place within the bureaucracy and in labs, and in both a swelteringly hot Washington, D.C. and a San Diego caught in a permanent June Gloom. I'm a Northern Californian; as far as I'm concerned, Washington, D.C. already is swelteringly hot all summer long and San Diego -- well, San Diego is on the California coast and I live next to the California coast and I see fog all year round, so what's the big deal? For a novel about climate change, the climate plays a surprisingly small role until the very end (but what an end!).
Robinson's books are always well-written, and his trilogies tend to improve as they go along, but Forty Signs of Rain is a weak start for a remarkable writer. You can be sure, however, that I'll keep reading the trilogy.
...less
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February 26
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Steve
gave
to:
Pthreads Programming: A POSIX Standard for Better Multiprocessing (O'Reilly Nutshell)
by Bradford Nichols
bookshelves:
technical
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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recommended for: people new to threads in general or pthreads in particular
read in February, 2008
Steve said:
"Old but good. I'd give this book 5 stars except that it's a technical reference manual, and, well, it's just not going to change my life. It will make my life easier, however.
This book is clear, cogent and eminently readable. It's a good introduc...more
Old but good. I'd give this book 5 stars except that it's a technical reference manual, and, well, it's just not going to change my life. It will make my life easier, however.
This book is clear, cogent and eminently readable. It's a good introduction to threaded programming (and all the pitfalls therein) as well as the POSIX threads (Pthreads) interface. The examples are clear and well-thought-out, the code samples are plentiful. The authors never elide over important-but-subtle details nor do they waste your time on things you shoudldn't care about.
I wish more technical books were like this....less
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Steve, it's cool to see your reviews -- we like a lot of the same books! Except maybe the Unix/Linux stuff :^O
