In an effort to keep my mind open to changing technologies and avoid drinking the Mac Fanboy kool-aid, I have spent the last month using a Nokia Lumia 800 as my primary smartphone. It has been an eye-opening experience and…
Conor O’Clery’s Moscow 25 December 1991 follows a notably growing trend for picking a pivot point in history and revolving around it to find a popular audience (witness 1066, 1421, 1434, 1491, 1492 etc. All good books by and large…
Here’s a bit of a diversion from recent reviews. Keeping Score: Project Management for the Pros by Frank Ryle is a lively, yet deceptively prescient look at adapting a variety of management styles to the PM process. Using a narrative…
The *Big* Data Glossary is actually a relatively *short* book, best enjoyed as an eBook in my estimation. This volume is similar to a number of recent releases from O’Reilly that have moved from being deep and comprehensive to providing…
Insightful, substantive and a must-read for anyone working with data visualisation as consumer or designer. Julie Steele and Noah Ilinsky’s new volume – Designing Data Visualisations – from O’Reilly succeeds in applying a long overdue and well crafted taxonomic process…
Iconic and authentic. I remember being mildly amused by the first incarnation of Andy Hertzfeld’s collection of anecdotes when it was first published. Revolution in the Valley was an intriguing and engaging set of reminiscences by many of those involved…
Before I jump into the book I thought I would quickly note what my expectations are so that these are clear in the evaluation. Flash Catalyst is a high-level web development tool that allows for the creation of flash-based web…
I wouldn’t typically review my more general reading material here, but Anglo Republic: Inside the Bank that Broke Ireland by Simon Carswell warranted an exception. A thoroughly satisfying and compelling read, Carswell documents the rise and fall of the bank…
Why? Unfortunately, I quickly come to this question and don’t get an answer when reading Getting Started with Geo, CouchDB and Node.js. The brief summary and end piece of the book enticed me. The premise appeared to be: today’s technology…
Wow! This is the manual that should come with the camera. If you, like me, come away from the stock manual disappointed, frustrated, or just feeling that it simply leaves out all the practical ‘why’ type information…get this book. Coming…
I really like an instructional book that begins with “Chapter2 provides some background on RDF, the semantic web, and where SPARQL fits in, but before going into that, let’s start with a bit of hands-on experience writing and running SPARQL…
Learning Perl (Sixth Edition) Is the latest iteration of the de facto standard for learning the basics of the PERL programming language. It has been lately updated to deal with the latest changes to the language remains a superb starting…