Book Review: Amazon Web Services in Action, by Andreas Wittig and Michael WittigWe're a heavy user of AWS at work; in fact, someone once described Amazon as "a cloud provider with a bookstore on the side". As such it's inevitable that you get a view of some services and just enough knowledge to get by, but without a real understanding of the bigger ( Read more... )

Book Review: MongoDB - The Definitive Guide, by Kristina ChodorowI try not to read books in parallel, but a Kindle offer prompted me to shell out for this book, and I wasn't too keen on taking my tablet to the Proms so I have been alternating for the last couple of weeks. I'm at the stage where I have dabbled quite a bit with MongoDB at work, but ( Read more... )

Book Review: Tubes - Behind the scenes at The Internet, by Andrew BlumI have to admit, this was not really the book I had hoped for. I thought it would describe, in a non-technical way, how your device requests and obtains data from the Internet; in fact, it's more of a psychogeographical tour of some notable physical sites that relate to the ( Read more... )

Book Review: Go in Action, by William Kennedy
At work, we are increasingly using Go(lang) as a leaner and faster alternative to Java for our microservices and I felt it would be worthwhile reading up on the subject. Gone are the days of enormous tomes, though this was still a paper book ( Read more... )

Book Review: Colossus - Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret, by Paul Gannon
This has been on my shelves for way too long. I've discovered that the best way to manage - physically and electronically - is to add to my to-read tag in Goodreads, so things don't get forgotten.

In The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, Sydney Padua mentioned ( Read more... )

Book Review: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney PaduaBack to the work book sale; I think I'd vaguely heard of this one when I saw it in the sale and decided it was something different to try. I'd initially thought of it as a graphic novel, but really it's more just a series of cartoons without a specific plot-line. There ( Read more... )

Book Review: Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide, by John ArundelPreviously, when I had looked to decide whether it was worth learning about Chef or Puppet (or something else altogether), the result was inconclusive, but now I am working somewhere Puppet is used, it's clear. I was looking for a quick-start guide to Puppet, one that would fill in the basic ( Read more... )

Book Review: Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, by David J. AndersonThis was a very useful book, as it turned out I had significantly misunderstood Kanban (or had it mis-explained to me) as a chaotic free-for-all process. In fact it's all based on managing workflow and limiting (matching) the number of in-progress ( Read more... )

Book Review: The Cucumber for Java Book, by Seb Rose, Matt Wynne, and Aslak Hellesøy
I advocated the introduction of the Cucumber testing framework at the place I've just left and saw it adopted with reasonable success. However I do find that there's a limit to being self-taught (especially when you've become the de facto subject matter expert) and ( Read more... )

Book Review: Apache Maven Dependency Management, by Jonathan LalouAt one stage there was a new edition of O'Reilly's book on Maven scheduled for publication, but it got pulled at the last minute, and I didn't want to rely on a 7 year old first edition knowing it would be significantly out of date. So I tried this book instead; the Amazon reviews ( Read more... )