Four brief reviews

Princeton University Press and No Starch Press both sent me a couple books this week. Here are a few brief words about each.

The first from Princeton was The Best Writing on Mathematics 2014 (ISBN 0691164177). My favorite chapters were The Beauty of Bounded Gaps by Jordan Ellenberg and The Lesson of Grace in Teaching by Francis Su. The former is a very high-level overview of recent results regarding gaps in prime numbers. The latter is taken from the Francis’ Haimo Teaching Award lecture. A recording of the lecture and a transcript are available here.

The second book from Princeton was a new edition of Andrew Hodges’ book Alan Turing: The Enigma (ISBN 069116472X). This edition has a new cover and the new subtitle “The Book That Inspired the Film ‘The Imitation Game.'” Unfortunately I’m not up to reading a 768-page biography right now.

The first book from No Starch Press was a new edition of The Book of CSS3: A Developer’s Guide to the Future of Web Design by Peter Gasston (ISBN 1593275803). The book says from the beginning that it is intended for people who have a lot of experience with CSS, including some experience with CSS 3. I tend to ignore such warnings; many books are more accessible to beginners than they let on. But in this case I do think that someone with more CSS experience would get more out of the book. This looks like a good book, and I expect I’ll get more out of it later.

The final book was a new edition of How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know by Brian Ward (ISBN 1593275676). I’ve skimmed through this book and would like to go back and read it carefully, a little at a time. Most Unix/Linux books I’ve seen either dwell on shell commands or dive into system APIs. This one, however, seems to live up to its title and give the reader an introduction to how Linux works.