hub@figuiere.net - Updated July 26th 2007

Reading list

I decided to put online the list of books I read. The book is added on the list the day I finish it (or I mean with the date I finish it).

The List

February 2008

7th - Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS3, Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe. Peachpit Press

Digital Photography Software - This book talks about the de-facto software used for camera RAW processing. Of course this is non-Free software, but the content is interesting as it give a very detailed view of what the users seems to expects, including by mentionning limitations and shortcomings. A good way to specify what has to be done in a Free Software implementation.

October 2007

25th - Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, Mikkel Aaland. O'Reilly Media

Digital Photography Software - First there are some nice pictures of Iceland, but that's not why I read this book. Lightroom is a proprietary software designed for photographer. Reading this book helps me better understand all the subtelties of the software in order to better understand what photographers like in it. Ultimately it will help me to design a Free Software for similar use.

September 2007

23rd - Banana Republicans, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. Tarcher / Penguin

Politics - Everything you wanted to know about Republicans but were afraid to ask.

20th - Big Planet, Jack Vance. Gollancz

Science-Fiction - A mission on a big planet were people exhiled themselves from Earth. It all start with the crash of the space ship due to a sabotage.

17th - L.G.M. 2/4, Roland C. Wagner. Onyx

Science-Fiction - In French, part 2 of 4. An alternate reality where Martian live on Mars and where the Soviet Union still exists. Lot of references to classic science-fiction.

13th - L.G.M. 1/4, Roland C. Wagner. Onyx

Science-Fiction - In French, part 1 of 4

11th - Le Loup de Deb, Nicolas Jarry. Mnemos

Fantasy - In French

July 2007

22nd - Triplanetary, E.E. Smith. Gutenberg Project

Science Fiction - Classic pulp Sci-Fi from E.E. Smith republished by the gutenberg project as an e-book.

14th - Nine Tomorrows, Isaac Asimov. Fawcett Crest

Science Fiction - Short stories from Isaac Asimov. I had read it in French previously. Seems to be out of print as well. Isaac Asimov remains one of my first Sci-Fi author and actually the one that made me pickup on reading.

13th - Cross Bones, Kathy Reichs. Scribners

Fiction - Temperance Brenan is a Forensic anthropologist for the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaire et de Medicine Legale in Montreal, QC. This the series of books that inspired the TV show "Bones" (2005)

June 2007

27th - Trojan Odyssey, Clive Cussler. Putnam

Fiction / Adventure - Dirk Pitt is here to save the world once again. Still entertaining, but still very predictible.

May 2007

6th - Next of Kin, Eric Frank Russell. Gollancz

Science-Fiction - I think I already read that novel a long time ago, in French, as an already out of print edition; this one apparently is too, that's why I just pay a couple of bucks. "The great escape" revisited with talent in a pan-galactic war. Leeming is a scout in the earth spatial navy that have serious issues with the military discipline. He is sent into an reconnaissance mission into enemy territory...

April 2007

16th - Worlds, Joe Haldeman. Gollancz

Science-Fiction - The Worlds are these asteroids in the solar system that earth colonized in the 21st century, and that provide unvaluable resources like energy to Earth. O'Hara is selected to go to Earth for university. The world will change... Written in 1955, this novel talks about energy crisis and revolution, and in my opinion does spots it pretty well. I already liked The Forever War, that I unfortunately own in French.

15th - Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland. Random House Canada

Fiction - Liz Dunn life change the day she got a call from the RCMP telling her that someone is in the hospital with her name as an emergency contact. From the author of Microserfs

11th - Beyond the C++ Standard Library, an introduction to Boost, Björn Karlsson. Addison Wesley

Programming - If you intend to use Boost, read this book. The chapter about Boost.Lambda, Boost.Bind and Boost.Function is worth it. Other topic covered are Boost.Signals, Boost.Any, Boost.Tuple, Boost.Variant, Boost.Regex, Boost.Operators, Boost.Utility, Boost.Conversion and Boost.Smart_ptr. You need to know C++ to understand this book, but fortunately I find if very easy to read, even for the very hairy topics. Off course this cover just a fraction of Boost.

March 2007

30th - Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets, Peter Ven Der Linden. Prentice Hall

Programming. This rather old book (written in 1994) talks about problems even advanced C programmers might run into. It is interesting to learn about C design flaws, and the chapter about C++ is even more critical. Note that in 2007 this book really show its age but there are still several interesting bits given by this software engineer from Sun.

January 2007

31st - Learning Perl, Randal L. Schwartz. O'Reilly Associates

Programming - aka The Llama book. The book to read to learn Perl programming. I had it for a while and read it by chunk, mostly because of other opportunities to read or more urgent needs. I finally finished it. Note that I had learnt Perl, self-taught, reading Advanced Perl Programming (now as Second Edition), a few years back.

29th - Asterisk, The Future of Telephony, Jim Van Meggelen, Leif Madsen and Jared Smith. O'Reilly Associates

Sysadmin - This books cover Asterisk, the VoIP server software for Linux. This is resourcefull if you want to get started quickly with it. But there are a large number of page that basically reprints the reference that is available (it is not really a reprint, but roughly the same content). I wish it was just not there to save trees...

December 2006

27th - Leica M7 Handbook, Jonathan Eastland. Ajax

Photography - Pure curiosity to read about the Leica M7, the last of the Leica rangefinder film camera. Not sure how useful it is if you don't have the camera.

26th - Lighting for Portrait Photography, Steve Bavister. Rotovision

Photography - Practical exemples on how photographer setup their lighting for portraits photography. Various genres and subject are explained.

19th - The DAM Book, Digital Assets Management for Photographers, Peter Krogh. O'Reilly Associates

Computing, Digital Photography - Everything you need to know about managing a large collection of photographies, as a photographer.

9th - Learning XML, Erik T. Ray. O'Reilly Associates

Computing - If you want to learn XML, this is a good pick. The book covers XML and stylesheets (CSS and XSLT) as well as API (SAX and DOM). It actually leave me a better impression than XML in a Nutshell. Still an introductory book to XML.

November 2006

28th - Understanding SOAP, Kennard Scribner and Mark C. Stiver. SAMS

Computing - SOAP is a XML based RPC protocol designed to work over HTTP and other protocols. Despiting the author claiming that this book is not Microsoft oriented, it still have example written in VB and half of the book used for a chapter about binding SOAP to COM. That makes it go lower in my ratings. Fortunately I just borrowed it from the office bookshelf.

21st - Le saint des seins, Guillaume Nicloux. Librio

Crime - French - Another "Le Poulpe".

15th - Nazis dans le métro, Didier Daeninckx. Librio

Crime - French - Part of the series "Le Poulpe". What could be considered as a French pulp.

12th - Look to Windward, Iain M. Banks. Pocket Books

Science-Fiction - Another Culture novel.

10th - First Meetings in the Enderverse, Orson Scott Card. Tor

Science-Fiction - 4 shorts from the Ender's Game series, 2 before, one after and a reprint of the original short "Ender's Game". I haven't read anything in the Ender's Game series, but now I'm intersted in it. It only took a couple of hour to read. Apparently the title of the book varies depending on the print.

9th - C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4, Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield. Prentice Hall

Programming - An update of C++ Programming with Qt 3 for Qt 4. Brings its own set a valuable information, but if you have already read the old one, you might not want to wast time reading this as most of the concepts still apply.

September 2006

24th - 21 Dog Years : A Cube Dweller's Tale, Mike Daisey. Free Press

Humour - The tale of a cube worker are Amazon, describing the insanity found in companies of the dot-com era. Sometime scary about what was the thinking, and may be a good reason why the bubble imploded, even thought Amazon is still around, alive and kicking.

July 2006

30th - Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Erich Gamma and al.. Addison-Weslay Professional

Programming - Design Patterns are concept for programming oriented towards maximum code reusability for object-oriented programming. Any OO programmer probably use some design patterns without even knowing. A must read.

June 2006

12th - The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman. Basic Books

Psychology and design - Describing today human interaction design problems by just taking example on everyday things, like taps, door nobs and telephone systems and the user psychology.

May 2006

10th - The Humane Interface, by Jef Raskin. Addison Wesley

Computer Science - This book provides you with theory and practical example on how to make a user interactive interface more humane. It also provide you with new directions to explore as well a some way to compute how efficient is your interface.

3rd - User Interface Design for Programmers, by Joel Spolsky. APress

Computer Science - A must read for anybody willing to write software with UI. This book is about common sense in user interface design, not about the peculiar of UI. Really pragmatic.

April 2006

27th - Revolution in the Valley, by Andy Hertzfeld. O'Reilly Associates

Computer History - An insider story of the Macintosh creation, with lot of little details, both personal and technical, from one of the lead software engineer in the original team. The book contains lot of pictures and original development documents (design notes) fron 20 years ago.

15th - World War 3.0 - Microsoft and its enemies, by Ken Auletta. Random House.

Business - The story of the Microsoft anti-trust trial in the US. A documented and insightful report in the anti-trust trial started at the end of the 90's by the Department of Justice of the USA. It uncovers and decrypt the thousand of pages of the trial transcript and provide background facts. I bought my copy for CAD$2.99 + taxes, and it seems to be out of print.

8th - STL Tutorial and Reference Guide (1st Edition) , by David R. Musser and Atul Saini. Addison Wesley. Pick the second edition.

Programming - A must read for any C++ programmer. STL stands for Standard Template Library and is part of the standard C++ library (defined by the ISO standard). The first edition that I read is a bit outdated, but not that much. API details can be sorted out by the online documentation, and the rest is still really valid. The second edition stick to the standard.

February 2006

27th - The Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling. Bantam.

This book, that I read in electronic format, relates the story of computer crime and phreaking in the 80's and early 90's. I downloaded it from the Maemo Plucker port page.

24th - Linux Server Hacks, by Rob Flickenger. O'Reilly Associates.

Sysadmin - A nice generalist book for sysadmins on Linux. See my blog post

5th - KDE 2.0 Development, by David Sweet. SAMS Publishing.

Programming - The official KDE 2.0 developers' guide. Also available online. I read it learn more about KDE development.

January 2006

29th - Postfix, the Definitive guide, Kyle D Dent. O'Reilly Associates.

Sysadmin - This book answers most questions you have about Postfix, how to use it and how to configure it. more...

16th - Linux Unwired, Rogers Weeks, End Dumbill and Brian Jepson. O'Reilly Associates.

Sysadmin - It is all about getting you Linux system wireless connected, be it through Wifi, Bluetooth, IRDA or even cellular phone. A good practical book on how to handle these technologies, even though they have evolved since. more...

Kerberos, the definitive guide, Jason Garman. O'Reilly Associates.

Sysadmin - An all-in-one manual for deploying the Kerberos authentication system into your organisation. Kerberos is a secure distributed authentication system developed at MIT, designed to allow single-sign-on login. It works on UNIX, MacOS X and Windows 2000 (it is part of Active Directory). more...

Spamassassin, Alan Schwartz. O'Reilly Associates.

Sysadmin - is a practical book for whoever wants to deploy Spamassassin on his email system. I explain how to install with various MTA, including Postfix. more...