Book review queue

I’ve got a backlog of books to review. I may not write more about all of them here so I’ll at least mention them briefly.

Packt Publishing sent me copies of Python 3 Web Development Beginners Guide and Python Testing Cookbook. The former may not be what you expect from the title. It focuses on self-contained development with minimal dependencies. It’s not a book on popular Python web development frameworks like Django.

I have a couple books I need to review for the MAA. The first is Validated Numerics: A Short Introduction to Rigorous Computations (ISBN 0691147817). This one is less general than title implies. It’s a book about interval arithmetic and frankly it’s dry as dust so far.

The second MAA book is The History and Development of Nomography (ISBN 1456479628). Nomography is the lost art of graphical computing. A great deal of ingenuity and artistry went into producing graphics that allowed users to solve equations without numerical computation. For beautiful examples, see Dead Reckonings, Ron Doerfler’s website.

Eric Sink has a new book in press Version Control by Example (ISBN 0983507902). I enjoyed reading through one of the early drafts. I haven’t yet read the final version though I plan to soon. This book shows how to use distributed version control, comparing several popular systems. It does more than tell you which buttons to push or APIs to call; it shows how to solve problems that come up in day-to-day software development.

The final book on my review list is The Physics Book by Cliff Pickover (ISBN 1402778619). This book is the physics analog of The Math Book that Pickover published a couple years ago. I look forward to reading this one based on my enjoyment of The Math Book.

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One thought on “Book review queue

  1. Dining in Kuala Lumpur

    It seems very interesting to solve equations without numerical computation. I will purchase this book.

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