I’ve only seen the film once, and it was a few years ago, but I actually enjoyed it quite a bit.

This is one of the few films which completely captures not only the essence, but also almost all of the content of the book. On it’s own merits, and especially considering the base content of the book, the film is extremely well done. Part of this is because the movie includes the father reading the book to the son, which allows for narrative interruptions without loss of continuity.

This is one of the few cases where I can’t say I got more from the book than I did from the movie.

Last summer I saw Les Miserables, the musical, for the first time. The story, the music and the acting were all great. I felt, however, that I was missing something. I felt that the musical moved pretty fast (it does) and that there was a lot more to the story than I was actually seeing (I was). I determined to read the book. Except that it’s a pretty long book. Should I take the abridged version, or go for the unabridged? Since I wanted the entire story, since I didn’t want to miss anything, I decided to tackle the unabridged version. My coworker had a copy translated by Charles E. Wilbour, and offered to let me read it. It took me about 2 months to get through 1200+ pages. It was well worth it; I was sad to come to the end.

Whereas the musical stats with Jean Valjean, who later meets a priest, the book starts with the story of the priest, who later meets a traveler. By the time the priest gives Valjean the silver candlesticks, which in the musical is an extraordinary event, it’s only what you would naturally expect of the priest, whom we know to be an extraordinary person.

Victor Hugo is incredibly descriptive. He spends pages of long paragraphs in one place, describing a single scene, and then throws in a singe sentence which changes the course of the story, one additional insight which changes the way you’ve been looking at everything. For example, Hugo spends 50 pages describing the history of the battle of Waterloo to set the scene for a single paragraph. The actions of this paragraph reverberate, however, through the rest of the story, through the very last pages. When Jean Valjean escapes a raging battle by crawling into the sewers, Hugo pauses to give us a 20 page introduction to the Paris sewer system, starting with the history of the sewers in medieval times. As the story continues, you know exactly what Jean is getting into, and exactly what he’s going through (literally). A few of the histories and speeches drag, but the story itself is riveting. The context is complete, and well worth it.

I think I ended up with a good translation. Some people say that other translations, with their modernized language, are easier to read, but I didn’t find the language an impediment at all. In fact, I enjoyed the slightly higher language than we find in our day-to-day speech.

Consider this passage, the first paragraph of the 6th chapter of the 6th book of the 3rd volume, the first from Isabel F. Hapgood’s translation, and the second from Charles E. Wilbour’s. I find Wilbour’s translation both clearer and more enjoyable on many points. Had I read the Hapgood translation I fear there would still have been much which I would have missed.

On one of the last days of the second week, Marius was seated on his bench, as usual, holding in his hand an open book, of which he had not turned a page for the last two hours. All at once he started. An event was taking place at the other extremity of the walk. Leblanc and his daughter had just left their seat, and the daughter had taken her father’s arm, and both were advancing slowly, towards the middle of the alley where Marius was. Marius closed his book, then opened it again, then forced himself to read; he trembled; the aureole was coming straight towards him. “Ah! good Heavens!” thought he, “I shall not have time to strike an attitude.” Still the white-haired man and the girl advanced. It seemed to him that this lasted for a century, and that it was but a second. “What are they coming in this direction for?” he asked himself. “What! She will pass here? Her feet will tread this sand, this walk, two paces from me?” He was utterly upset, he would have liked to be very handsome, he would have liked to own the cross. He heard the soft and measured sound of their approaching footsteps. He imagined that M. Leblanc was darting angry glances at him. “Is that gentleman going to address me?” he thought to himself. He dropped his head; when he raised it again, they were very near him. The young girl passed, and as she passed, she glanced at him. She gazed steadily at him, with a pensive sweetness which thrilled Marius from head to foot. It seemed to him that she was reproaching him for having allowed so long a time to elapse without coming as far as her, and that she was saying to him: “I am coming myself.” Marius was dazzled by those eyes fraught with rays and abysses.

On one of the last days of the second week, Marius was as usual sitting on his seat holding in his hand an open book of which he has not turned a leaf for two hours. Suddenly he trembled. A great event was commencing at the end of the walk. Monsieur Leblanc and his daughter had left their seat, the daughter had taken the arm of the father, and they were crossing slowly towards the middle of the walk where Marius was. Marius closed his book, then he opened it, then he made and attempt to read. He trembled. The halo was coming straight towards him. “O dear!” thought he, “I shall not have time to take an attitude.” However, the man with the white hair and the young girl were advancing. It seemed to him that it would last a century, and that it was only a second. “What are they coming by here for?” he asked himself. “What! is she going to pass this place! Are her feet to press this ground in this walk, but a step from me?” He was overwhelmed, he would gladly have been very handsome, he would gladly have worn the cross of the Legion of Honour. He herd the gentle and measured sound of their steps approaching. He imagined that Monsieur Leblanc was hurling angry looks upon him “Is the going to speak to me?” thought he. He bowed his head; when he raised it they were quite near him. She looked at him steadily, with a sweet and thoughtful look which made Marius tremble from head to foot. It seemed that she reproached him for having been so long without coming th her and that she said: “It is I who shall come.” Marius was bewildered by these eyes full of flashing light and fathomless abysses.

The Mythical Man-Month gives you an interesting, almost historical perspective on computing. It’s interesting to see what in computing has changed (assembly programming, time-sharing) and what hasn’t (the need for documentation, the importance of people), and to think of a time when things like Object Oriented programming was a radical new idea. Make sure to get the Twentieth Anniversary edition; it includes a nice update by Brooks where he reviews some of his original predictions.

This is my favorite part–it captures so well much of what is great about programming:

The Joys of the Craft

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his first mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something; sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Addison-Wesley Professional:1995. 7-8.

I’ve heard so many quotes from this work that I was really surprised by how short it is–it’s less than 7,000 words, whereas the book of Genesis is over 38,000. It’s pretty packed with good stuff, though. If a few of Allen’s individual arguments seem weak it is only because of the completeness with which he treats the topic. His message is clear and well-supported: thoughts are much more powerful than most realize, with a reach far beyond the limits of the mind.

The table of contents reads:

• Thoughts and Character
• Effect of Thought on Circumstances
• Effect of Thought on Health and the Body
• Thought and Purpose
• The Thought-Factor in Achievement
• Visions and Ideals
• Serenity

Some choice quotes:

As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds f thought, and could not have appeared without them.

…cause and effect is as absolute and undeviating in the hidden realm of thought as in the world of visible and material things.

Man is made or unmade by himself; in the armory of thought he forges the weapons of which he destroys himself; he also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace.

Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.

Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become.

As a Man Thinketh is available from Project Gutenberg.

Great tips applicable to any language or project, and a good read too. The book includes scores of good tips, but since the Quick Reference Guide has to go back to the library with the rest of the book:

1. Care About Your Craft
2. Think! About Your Work
3. Provide Options, Don’t Make Lame Excuses
4. Don’t Live with Broken Windows
5. Ba a Catalyst for Change
6. Remember the Big Picture
7. Make Quality a Requirements Issue
8. Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio
9. Critically Analyze What You Read and Hear
10. It’s Both What You Say and the Way You Say It
11. DRY–Don’t Repeat Yourself
12. Make It Easy to Reuse
13. Eliminate Effects Between Unrelated Things
14. There Are No Final Decisions
15. Use Tracer Bullets to Find the Target
16. Prototype to Learn
17. Program Close to the Problem Domain
18. Estimate to Avoid Surprises
19. Iterate the schedule with the Code
20. Keep Knowledge in Plain Text
21. Use the Power of Command Shells
22. Use a Single Editor Well
23. Always Use Source Code Control
24. Fix the Problem, Not the Blame
25. Don’t Panic
26. “select” Isn’t Broken
27. Don’t Assume It–Prove It
28. Learn a Text Manipulation Language
29. Write Code That Writes Code
30. You Can’t Write Perfect Software
31. Design with Contracts
32. Crash Early
33. If It Can’t Happen, Use Assertions to Ensure That It Won’t
34. Use Exceptions for Exceptional Problems
35. Finish What You Start
36. Minimize Coupling Between Modules
37. Configure, Don’t Integrate
38. Put Abstractions in Code, Details in Metadata
39. Analyze Workflow to Improve Concurrency
40. Design Using Services
41. Always Design for Concurrency
42. Separate Views from Models
43. Use Blackboards to Coordinate Workflow
44. Don’t Program by Coincidence
45. Estimate the Order of Your Algorithms
46. Test Your Estimates
47. Refactor Early, Refactor Often
48. Design to Test
49. Test Your Software, or Your Users Will
50. Don’t Use Wizard Code You Don’t Understand
51. Don’t Gather Requirements–Dig for Them
52. Work with a User to Think Like a User
53. Abstractions Live Longer than Details
54. Use a Project Glossary
55. Don’t Think Outside the Box–Find the Box
56. Listen to Nagging Doubts–Start When You’re Ready
57. Some Things Are Better Done than Described
58. Don’t Be a Slave to Formal Methods
59. Expensive Tools Do Not Produce Better Designs
60. Organize Around Functionality, Not Job Functions
61. Don’t Use Manual Procedures
62. Test Early. Test Often. Test Automatically.
63. Coding Ain’t Done ‘Til All The Tests Run
64. Use Saboteurs to Test Your Testing
65. Test State Coverage, Not Code Coverage
66. Find Bugs Once
67. Treat English as Just Another Programming Language
68. Build Documentation In, Don’t Bolt It On
69. Gently Exceed Your Users’ Expectations
70. Sign Your Work

I was expecting more..

Most of the tips offered in this book are basic. As a senior majoring in CS, there was little that I had not heard before. One strong point of the book, however, is how Gunderloy ties together all the loose ends of the development cycle. This book gives an excellent high-level overview of everything that should be happening throughout a development cycle, from project conception to release date and beyond.

The book is very heavily tied to VS .NET 2003; many chapters are little more than listings and explanation of VS add-ons and extensions, giving little value to anyone not using this particular IDE.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where some parts were so good and the rest was so bad. I had read excerpts of Walden as part of an English class in school, but must have read with a school-assignment mentality, as nothing really stuck with me. A couple years later I came across a quote from the book, which quote I absolutely adore(d). This single paragraph inspired me to pick up the book and read the entire thing. I have included this section, as well as a few other highlights, below.

Sure enough, parts of the book, where Thoreau waxes philosophical (or extensional), are absolutely amazing. The rest of the book… it’s pretty boring. True to subtitle, Walden is an account of Thoreau’s two years living in the woods by Walden pond. He takes an encyclopedic approach to journaling his experiences. The chapter titles often describe exactly the topic he is relating at the moment: “Visitors,” “The Bean-Fields,” “The Pond in Winter.” He spends pages and pages describing in excruciating detail the travelers who stopped to visit him, accounting for every half-penny he spent in cultivating his crops, and the nature of the bubbles in the ice covering the pond.

I recommend only a few chapters from Walden, “Economy,” “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” “Higher Laws,” and the “Conclusion.” The rest of the chapters are nearly identical in their mundaneness.

At the beginning of the book I made some assumptions about how the story ended, witch thankfully turned out to be wrong. By no means was Thoreau’s return to civilization related to, or indication of, any sort of failure in his experiment. In keeping with his goals, he writes “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”

Included in my copy of Walden was Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau is thrown in jail for tax evasion, and writes about his experiences. This is an excellent piece, challenging all traditional points of view. It opens the mind to new ways of thinking and an entirely new worldview.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.

(Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.)

One of the things I like about Heinlein is his ability to make a good point within a good story. The intergalactic setting of Citizen of the Galaxy provides a plausible backdrop for the issues Heinlein addresses, which are then easily transferred to life on our little earth. The story takes us with Thorby through five completely different settings as he lives and travels with different groups. He literally goes from being a beggar slave to rich and famous. While such luck is extraordinary even in science fiction, Thorby’s movement between such diverse social circles provides a nice set of contrasts. Most of us spend our entire lives within only one such sphere, oblivious to the existence of others. Each situation casts “freedom” in a different light, with unexpected results.

Truly a classic in of Science Fiction. I have encountered the Three Laws of Robotics many times in other settings, but this was my first time going to the source. The Laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Sounds pretty good, right? I thought so too, but most of the stories comprising the book are cases where these simple rules produce unexpected emergent behavior. Then the people have to figure out what’s going on, which usually involves determining how the robot is experiencing the situation to produce the unexpected behaviors within some interpretation of the Laws. This leads to a number of surprises.

Written during the 1940s, I, Robot is in many ways still relevant to a world which is slowly becoming increasingly more populated by robots. To the other extreme, on the other hand, reading about the gear-powered internals of Asimov’s robots was somewhat amusing. How far we’ve come, and inconceivable many aspects of today’s technology were back then. It makes you wonder what the future holds, and how the Laws of Robotics will play a role.

What if you loved someone, and did things to express your love for them, but they were looking for signs of your love in ways different than those you were offering? You miss each other, and the other person does not feel your loved. Every day there are loved people who don’t feel loved because the expressions of love they’re getting aren’t the expressions of love they’re looking for. This is because we all speak different love language. Love means different things to different people; each person experiences love, or prefers to be loved, in different ways. What complicates matters is that we tend to express love in the ways we like to receive love, which may not be the ways other people best receive love. And everybody enjoys receiving love. This is the problem The Five Love Languages seeks to solve. The most common love languages are:

1. Words of Affirmation
2. Quality Time
3. Receiving Gifts
4. Acts of Service
5. Physical Touch

Dr. Chapman describes each of the languages, as well as a number of “dialects,” giving examples on both how to identify and satiate each of the preferred love languages. I enjoyed this read because it is not only theoretical, but practical as well. The book is sort and simple, keeping to the point, and making for an enjoyable read. This is an approach to love that I have never seen addressed anywhere else, but seems to be an integral part of effective loving. Dr. Chapman presents a strong case for learning the love languages of those you love, and definitely contributes being a better lover.