Books

When a good author writes a bad book

Posted on by John

The other day I read a terribly bland book by an author I’ve previously enjoyed. (I’d rather not name the book or the author.) The book was remarkably unremarkable.

It reminded me that even the best strike out now and then. You have to evaluate someone by their best work, not their worst. If someone produces one masterpiece and a dozen clunkers, then they’ve produced a masterpiece. And that puts them ahead of people who crank out nothing but inoffensive mediocrities.

I also thought about how the author is likely to make a lot of money off his terrible book. That’s oddly encouraging. Even when you put out a clunker, not everyone will think it’s a clunker. It’s not necessary to do great work in order to make money, though doing great work is more satisfying.

Why read and write tech books?

Posted on by John

Now that we have Google, countless blogs, and Stack Overflow, why should anyone buy technical books? And why should anybody write them? Charles Petzold’s answer is that books provide a narrative in a way that the web cannot.

Books about programming have certainly become less essential over the past 15 years or so. …

The Web has demonstrated that its greatest strength is the accumulation of information from many sources, and providing links between related concepts. However, where the Web falls down is in presenting long narratives, and I think this is a problem. For thousands of years, human beings have learned not by accumulating facts, but by following a narrative — a story that forges a path through the forest of information rather than merely describing all the trees.

… Books — at least those that are written well — provide narratives that the Web does not. …

As I’m writing a book, my primary intent is not to regurgitate the documentation but to impose a narrative on the material. This narrative has to begin with the basics and gradually introduce more and more material with a pace that neither overwhelms nor bores the reader. A narrative is necessarily a single path, and I spend much time and effort coming up with a good one.

From An Experiment in Book Publishing.

I completely agree. I love the kind of books Petzold is talking about. And by the way, a book with a dozen authors isn’t a real book in my opinion. I’m disappointed whenever I’m browsing a library and think I’ve found a book on something, only to realize I’ve found a stack of articles bound together with no narrative.

Differential Equations and the City

Posted on by John

This afternoon I got a review copy of X and the City: Modeling Aspects of Urban Life (ISBN 0691154643) by John A. Adam. It’s a book about mathematical modeling, taking all its examples from urban life: public transportation, growth, pollution, etc. I’ve only skimmed through the book so far, but it looks like most of the applications involve differential equations. Some depend on algebra or probability.

The book looks interesting. I hope to say more about the book once I’ve had a chance to read it. The examples are all short, so it may be any easy book to read a little at a time.

I also got a review copy of The Book of Inkscape (ISBN 1593271816) today, and I’m expecting several other books soon. It may take a while to get through these since this is a busy time for me. When it rains, it pours.

If you’d like help applying differential equations, let’s talk.

Reading historical math

Posted on by John

I recently received review copies of two books by Benjamin Wardhaugh. Here I will discuss How to Read Historical Mathematics (ISBN 0691140146). The other book is his anthology of historical popular mathematics which I intend to review later.

Here is the key passage, located near the end of How to Read Historical Mathematics, for identifying the author’s perspective.

But not all historical mathematics is significant. And perhaps there is a second kind of significance, where something can be historically significant without being mathematically significant. Some historians (I’m one of them) delight in investigating mathematical writing that contains little or no important or novel mathematics: popular textbooks, self-instruction manuals, … or old almanacs and popular magazines with mathematical news or puzzles in them. These kinds of writing … are certainly significant for a historian who wants to know about popular experiences of mathematics. But they’re not significant in the sense of containing significant mathematics.

Wardhaugh’s perspective is valuable, though it is not one that I share. My interest in historical math is more on the development of the mathematical ideas rather than their social context. I’m interested, for example, in discovering the concrete problems that motivated mathematics that has become more abstract and formal.

I was hoping for something more along the lines of a mapping from historical definitions and notations to their modern counterparts. This book contains a little of that, but it focuses more on how to read historical mathematics as a historian rather than as a mathematician. However, if you are interested in more of the social angle, the book has many good suggestions (and even exercises) for exploring the larger context of historical mathematical writing.

Simmer reading list

Posted on by John

One of my friends mentioned his “simmer reading” yesterday. It was a typo—he meant to say “summer”—but a simmer reading list is interesting.

Simmer reading makes me think of a book that stays on your nightstand as other books come and go, like a pot left to simmer on the back burner of a stove. It’s a book you read a little at a time, maybe out of order, not something you’re trying to finish like a project.

What are some of your simmer reading books?

Related post: A book so good I had to put it down

Read history and fly an airplane

Posted on by John

The “About the Author” page at the end of Programming in Emacs Lisp says

Robert J. Chassell … has an abiding interest in social and economic history and flies his own airplane.

I love the childlike element of that bio. I could just imagine a kid saying “When I grow up, I want to read about history and fly my own airplane!” The bio is more about what the author enjoys than about how he makes his money. Maybe more bios should be like that.

The bio starts out by saying that Chassell speaks about Emacs and software freedom. I thought that was just to establish his bona fides for writing about Emacs Lisp, but his Wikipedia page says he’s a full-time speaker, so perhaps this is how he supports himself. I would not have thought that was possible, but good for him. Apparently he earns his living by talking about something he values.

Update: As suggested in the comments, perhaps Chassell’s livelihood does not come from his speaking. Maybe he has (or had) another career and chose not to include it in his bio. Or maybe he doesn’t need to earn a living from his speaking. In any case, it sounds like he’s doing something he loves and his bio focuses on that.

Superheroes of the Round Table

Posted on by John

The other day I was browsing the Rice library and ran across a little book called “Superheroes of the Round Table: Comics Connections to Medieval and Renaissance Literature” (ISBN 0786460687). It’s about how literature has influenced comic books, and how comic books shed light on literature.

I don’t know much about comic books, or about medieval and renaissance literature, but it’s fun to see someone draw them together, especially since the former is considered low culture and the latter high culture. It reminds me of Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, a serious book about an art form that isn’t often taken seriously.

I’ve only skimmed Superheroes of the Round Table, but it looks like a fun book. It draws connections, for example, between The Faerie Queene and Iron Man and between The Tempest and X-Men.

Just to give a flavor of the book’s analytical style, here is a classification the book gives for Arthurian legend in comic books.

  1. Traditional Tale. Arthur in comic book form with minimal superhero elements.
  2. Arthurian Toybox. Elements of Arthur sprinkled into other stories with no regard for literary context.
  3. Arthur as Translator. A modern superhero is dropped into Arthur’s Britain, like Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee.
  4. Arthur as Collaborator. Using Arthurian symbols and themes such as the sword in the stone or the round table.
  5. Arthur Transformed. Arthur placed into a new context.

Related post: Manga guides to science

tl;dr

Posted on by John

The slang “tl;dr” stands for “too long; didn’t read.” The context is often either a bad joke or a shallow understanding.

What bothers me most about tl;dr is the mindset it implies, scanning everything but reading nothing. I find myself slipping into that mode sometimes. Skimming is a vital skill, but it can become so habitual that it crowds out reflective reading.

When I realize everything I’m reading is short and new, when my patience has atrophied to the point that I get annoyed at long tweets, I’ll read something long and old to restore my concentration and perspective.

Related posts

Machine Learning for Hackers

Posted on by John

Drew Conway and John Myles White have a new book out, Machine Learning for Hackers (ISBN 1449303714). As the name implies, the emphasis is on exploration rather than mathematical theory. Lots of code, no equations.

If you’re looking for a hands-on introduction to machine learning, maybe as a prelude to or complement to a more theoretical text, you’ll enjoy this book. Even if you’re not all that interested in machine learning, you might enjoy the examples, such as how a computer could find patterns in senatorial voting records and twitter networks. And R users will find examples of using advanced language features to solve practical problems.

Book review: Functional Analysis

Posted on by John

Functional Analysis (ISBN 0691113874) by Elias Stein and Rami Shakarchi is a fast-paced book on functional analysis and related topics. By page 60, you’ve had a decent course in functional analysis and you’ve got 360 pages left.

This book is the last in a series of four volumes based on a series of lectures that began at Princeton in 2000. The first three volumes are devoted to

  1. Fourier series and integrals
  2. Complex analysis
  3. Measure theory, Lebesgue integration, and Hilbert spaces.

The first three books are not necessarily prerequisites for the fourth book, though the final book does assume familiarity with the basics of the topics in the earlier books. The final book does make fairly frequent references to its predecessors. Someone who has not read the first three volumes — I have not — can let these references go by.

Stein and Shakarchi bring in several topics that may not be considered functional analysis per se but are often included in functional analysis books, namely harmonic analysis and generalized functions. It goes into territory less often included in a functional analysis text: probability, Brownian motion, and an introduction to several complex variables. This broad selection of topics is in keeping with the stated aims of the lecture series

to present, in an integrated manner, the core areas of analysis … to make plain the organic unity that exists between the various parts of the subject …

The goal of integrating various parts of analysis may be most clearly seen in the fourth chapter: Applications of the Baire Category Theorem. The material here is not organized by result but rather by proof technique.

Each chapter ends with a set of “exercises” and a set of “problems.” The former are closely related to the material in the book and include generous hints. The latter are more challenging and go beyond the scope of the book.

Related: Applied functional analysis