Reading Log 2024

Part of my resolutions for 2024 was to read at least 26 books. I guess here’s just a list of books I’ve read this year that I’ll keep updating as I go

1. Technical Analysis is Mostly Bullshit - Tim Morris (80 pages)
   • didn’t love this book. felt like mostly common sense and was more of a pamphlet than a book
2. Hypermedia Systems - Carson Gross (350 pages)
   • really enjoyed it. im pure brick ass at frontend and being introduced to new old concepts in a fresh form felt good. gained a much deeper understanding of both the “hypermedia way” of doing things and the current SPA way of doing things
3. My Life with Chimpanzees - Jane Goodall (160 pages)
   • ok read. for the amount of story that she actually told, it was a nice story. but over 50% of the book (iirc) is spent between her childhood and advocating for environmentalism, and much less than I’d have imagined on actually talking about… her life with chimpanzees…
4. Feature Engineering Bookcamp - Sinan Ozdemir (272 pages)
   • read this to refresh my memory on feature engineering techniques to see if I was missing anything obvious for a project I’d been working on. A bit verbose for the amount of information given but I do like how it’s structured - giving a real-ish problem as context. the section on bias and fairness, while mostly irrelevant to my project, was the most interesting. never touched on any of that in school.
5. A Philosophy of Software Design - John Ousterhout (196 pages)
   • my favorite engineering book I’ve read in quite some time. would really recommend it to anybody who writes code
6. Nudge - Richard H. Thaler & Cass R. Sunstein (384 pages)
   • loved it, tons of interesting & memorable examples that illustrate their concepts.
7. Soul Survivor - Ken Gross & The Leininger Family (203 pages)
   • an entertaining read. wordy, but all books like this are I think. at best, it’s a compelling case of reincarnation. at worst, it’s fun.
8. Business Modeling for Database Design - Fabian Pascal (60 pages)
9. The Costly Illusion: Normalization, Integrity, and Performance - Fabian Pascal (46 pages)
10. The Final Null in the Coffin: A Relational Solution to Missing Data - Fabian Pascal (38 pages)
11. The Key to Keys: A Matter of Identity - Fabian Pascal (53 pages)
12. Truly Relational: What It Really Means - Fabian Pascal (49 pages)
13. Domains: The Database Glue - Fabian Pascal (31 pages)
    • For the above 6, I hesitate to call them books because theyre only ~50 pages each. But they are rather dense. Maybe I’ll count them but increase my reading goal, I don’t know. I loved these though. I feel like I understand the theory behind database design much better than from what I learned in school.
14. Strategia: A Primer on Theory and Strategy for Students of War - Charles S. Oliviero (247 pages)
    • No idea why I wanted to read this. The cover was pretty I guess. The way it’s written immediately makes Oliviero’s experience clear. One of those books where it feels like a privilege to read because of how much the author has to offer. That said, it was slightly boring than I’d hoped :)
15. Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners - C.J. Date (208 pages)
    • A great expansion on the content from the short books by Fabian Pascal. I originally thought Fabian might be a bit of a loon (purely from the look of his website, https://www.dbdebunk.com), but this book actually links to Fabian’s site. I guess that, at least as of 2005, they were friendly. So that was a bit validating - having no other real knowledge of the field (since I barely passed the single database management class I took in college) the aesthetic of dbdebunk made me quite worried I was reading content of a relational extremist. With the added authority of C.J. Date’s words, I now know Fabian is just a relational purist. Loved this. I’m definitely gonna read more (recent) works by Date as a follow up.
16. C Programming Language - Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie (272 pages)
    • Took a bit of a reading break to get some other stuff done. Have still been reading plenty of blogs and papers but a book break. I didn’t do many exercises in this book as I just wanted a quick primer on C, and it served its purpose well. I can at least read a good amount of C code easily now. The purpose of wanting a C refresher was to go through some operating systems content since I never took those classes in school. On to the next!
17. The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern - Keith Devlin (208 pages)
    • Yet again I took a long break from (finishing any) books. This seemed short and fun though so I got it. Really enjoyed it. The author’s commentary was weaved together well with the history and letters between Pascal and Fermat. Not a ton to say about it, but overall just a fun read. Also, I’ve been putting off reading because I’m BUSY not lazy. I hope I can still reach my new year’s resolution. I may have to read some shorter books to catch up ;)