iPad experience revives market for real books!

Will my subject tagline, "iPad experience revives market for real books!" appear in a newspaper article in the next few years?

If
my experience is any judge, there is at least a chance.  I've noticed
that when using my iPad if I come across a boring part of a novel or a
tech book, rather than plowing through it, I often revert to web browing
or playing a game.  The result is I read less.  I ma now combating this
by using ereaders and dare I say, real books!

Am I just an anachronism or does anyone else share my experience?

Later,

   --Gregg

ps- also posted in my google group, software experience

Simple isn't simple

This post is about John Maeda's book, The Laws of Simplicity. I just finished reading it and was simply impressed. If you read the reviews on amazon, they are mixed. I have a simpler take, read it and judge for yourself. It is a bit over $10 and 100 pages. At most it will take you the equivalent of 3 episodes of 24 to read and you will learn so much more.

I liked it a lot, will require it in many of my courses (HCI and Software Architecture and Design) and willl have several future posts on it. I have espoused simplicity and know simple isn't simple, but Maeda helps us in its pursuit. Software folks and engineers need more grounding (fore and back) in design concepts and this is a simple, gentle introduction. It is well written.

It seems appropriate to make this first post simple. For more information, Maeda has a web site. Later!

Gift Suggestions for Valentine's Day and Beyond

Although this is written a few days before Valentine's Day, this post can be referred to for any gift -giving event to provide gift suggestions for significant others or family or perhaps even yourself!  Of course I think the best expression that someone cares about you is not chocolates of Vermont Teddy Bears or flowers but rather books!  In particular books on computer science, human computer interaction, science fiction or history.  So here, in no particular order of preference, are gift suggestions.

My new favorite for software architecture in fact, besides Shaw and Garlan, the only one I would recommend is Rozanski, N. & Woods, E., Software Systems Architecture, Addison-Wesley, 2005, 0-321-11229-6.  I like it so much that it will be the first architecture book used in my software architecture and design class next time around.  Thanks Larry Bernstein for handing me a copy!

For those of you who like code and love C (very related), this book will have you appreciating it even more.  It stresses the joy of reading code for fun and education.  Spinellis, D. Code Reading, Addison Wesley, 2003, 0-201-79940-5.

(By the way the links are not necessarily the best price for these books, I just spread them around the various on line booksellers.)

These is never enough testing and sometimes the bureaucracy of the testing organizations defy common sense.   A book from Whittaker, encourages all of us to place more thought in testing and appreciate superb testers.  Whittaker, J.A. How to Break Software, Addison-Wesley, 2003, 0-201-79619-8.

As most of you who have recently taken my HCI course know, I am stressing distributed cognition and activity theory as the basis for HCI.  A great HCI primer on applying this theory to practical HCI, that just released a second edition is Sharp, H., Rogers, Y. & Preece, J. Interaction Design:  Beyond Human Computer Interaction, 2nd Edition, Wiley, 2006, 978-0-470-01866-8.

There are some books I run across that I just have to fit into a course.  This book, originated at MIT for a course on software engineering and internet applications, is a gem and it WILL be in some course I teach next year.  Andersson, E., Greenspun, P. & Grumet, A.  Software Engineering for Internet Application, MIT Press, 2006, 0-262-51191-6.

Finally for the science fiction fans in the audience three can't miss books from three superb authors.  In fact any book from these three are a superb read and I have read all of Gibson's books and most of Mieville and Stross (and intend to read the rest).  The first is from William Gibson, Neuromancer, the novel that started (or at least popularized it, there were precursors such as Philip K. Dick) the cyberpunk genre of science fiction and a superb read.  The second is from China Mieville, Perdido Street Station, a mix of science fiction and fantasy (this says a lot because I typically detest fantasy).   For really modern hard science fiction Charles Stross  and his novel Accelerando stands out in the pack. It is a mind opening (might I say from my generation, mind blowing read).   What makes them very special in the science fiction ranks is that they are all superb writers.

I hope this provides you with a great list that you can hand others or use yourself for gift giving to you on any special ordinary occassion.  I hopefully will be back soon with some  student blogs. Later!

 

 

Book Learning

On Friday I gave a talk at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. It is a revision of the earlier talk I gave at Drexel and can be accessed either at my home page or here. If you are interested, one of the faculty members at Hobart and William Smith, Professor Eck, has written a great introductory text on java that is available on the internet for free! You can get it here.

Speaking of free books, I downloaded this intro calculus book by H. Jerome Keisler of the University of Wisconsin and was very impressed. A post on slashdot recommended it.

One book that is not free but is the introductory and reference text for Artificial Intelligence is Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig's, Artificial intelligence: A modern approach, Prentice Hall, second edition, ISBN 0-13-790395-2. I plan to use it in a future course and it would be a great book for anyone wanting to understand the current issues in AI.

In a later post I will survey some of the more general places on the web for free downloadable texts. I would appreciate any suggestions of worthwhile downloadable texts or comments on the texts I suggested. Later!

New Kind of Science

For those of you that do not read slashdot (and if you do not it is highly recommended and can be accessed here), one of the items yesterday was announcing that Stephen Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science, is accessible for free here. All it requires is a short registration. The book is fairly recent and huge (1192 pages). Wolfram's concepts have elicited strong reactions. As the title suggests he does have a touch of ego. Nowithstanding he is one of the intellectual mileposts of our generation and it is worth exploring his ideas. Wolfram also is the creator of Mathematica, a superb but pricey math system and programming environment. Check it out. As I trudge through it, I will have more to say about it and also others reaction to it. Later.

Quality Recommendations

One of my students has asked for recommendations on books for Software Quality Assurance and Testing. I will provide you my recommendations in a later post but I am interested in your recommendation of books and websites on these two topics. Thanks for your help! Later.