88Pro Thinking

Past ten days I have been busy with work. Hence no blog updates. I have got 8 new books to my book shelve and no time to read them yet. My room is in disarray and no time to put it together. As far as being in busy schedule, I don’t expect things to get better in the near future. Back to the new books…

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Blink is one of those books I read cover to cover in few days and from that time on I wanted to read The Tipping Point, the first book of Malcolm Gladwell and national best seller. From the tag line “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”, I had a very different perception about the book. I was under the impression that it covered stuff like how little things in ones life make big difference. However now I am in the second chapter and essentially the coverage is mush wider and not individualistic. For example how few kids in a down town wearing Hush Puppies shoes, shy rocketed the sales from few thousands to millions in couple of years, and what was the point which tipped (triggered) this epidemic. I am enjoying it already.


Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Apps

From the day I got my hands on to Pragmatic Programmer by Andy and Dave (another book I finished reading), I wanted to buy all their future releases. I got hold of Pragmatics Version Control with CVS, and now given it to someone and I don’t remember who I have given it to. At this point in my career I really need that book. If you are reading this blog, and if you have the book, please give it back. Pragmatic Automation on the other hand has some cool tricks as to how to visually indicate whether a nightly build has broken using Lava Lamps, red and green.

Data Crunching

I have been doing lot of data crunching my self in my previous job. One time I clearly remember one of our implementers had to extract Name, Address and Phone number from a telecom white pages, which was in PDF format. Once he converted the PDF to text format it looked almost impossible to extract this information. He approached me. You got to appreciate the power of regular expression especially when it is embedded into a scripting language (Python) to do these kinds of tasks. The expression I used was ((\S {0,1})*)[ ]{4,100}((\S {0,1})*)[ ]{4,100}(([0-9]{3,3})-([0-9]{4,4})) and the first time the Mastering Regular Expressions book came in handy for me. Data Crunching, talks about this very topic, how to extract data from various different sources, and since I have some experience crunching data; I hope this book provides me with more tricks which I can add to my skill set bag.

Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook

Code Generation in Action

An area I always wanted to get into is Code Generation. This is the first book came in that domain (to my knowledge) and uses Ruby as the language to illustrate fundamentals of Code Generation.

Beginning J2ME: From Novice to Professional, Third Edition (Novice to Professional)

J2ME is the new domain I want to step into in my free time. J2ME API is getting richer and the domain is maturing. I am particularly interested in the Location Based API which only a handful of Siemens Phones seems to be supporting at now and Nokia 9500 Communicator. I have few ideas in my mind on J2ME applications, if you have any idea as to what kind of J2ME applications you would like to see, leave a comment.

Java Reflection in Action (In Action series)

Long time back I went for a job interview and the first question was in a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being lowest and 5 bring highest competence where I would rate myself in Java. I thought for sometime and said may be 4. The next question was do you know Java Reflection API, and since I have never used it I answered NO. Next question was how can you rate yourself at 4 with out knowing Java Reflection API? I still don’t believe that I have to know Reflection API to call myself a competent developer, but I guess its time I have a look at it and go beyond “I know what it can do” to “I know if times comes, how to do it” level.

Thinkpad: A Different Shade of Blue

I love ThinkPads. Need more explanation? I don’t think so.

posted by 88Pro / Saturday, June 25, 2005