I hope this is not my legacy

I recently set myself the challenge of learning Haskell, and to do this I am going to write a little command line networked Poker game. I started off just using the GHC tutorials and what little I remember from a 10 credit university module on functional languages, but I much prefer to have some dead-tree in my hands, so I ordered this from Amazon. I’m currently three chapters in, and so far the book has given a good introduction to the language, although nothing that I didn’t already know. Flicking through the book, it looks promising, and I am pretty excited to see what it has to offer, so I will update this when I have read more.

One of my all time favourite books. I am currently reading it again at a more leisurely pace to really soak up every word. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. For those not in the know, it is a brilliant tongue-in-cheek dig at 1990′s yuppie life: funny, clever and brutal.

This book was recommended by many influential people in the software industry including Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, so I thought it would be worth the investment. I am over three quarters of the way through the book, and it has easily paid for itself already. The book is simply a series of interviews with some of the “all time greats of programming” on a variety of topics, but it has really rekindled my creative spark and got me thinking about some new ideas and problems which I hadn’t previously considered. I will probably post some blog entries on certain related topics at some point, and also some excerpts from the book which I found particularly poignant. However, for now you will have to trust me and just go and buy the book!

I have recently started watching college football, mainly due to the lack of NFL coverage on TV in the UK. Its at better times, the fans are more passionate, the games are a bit more random, and they have massive marching bands, so whats not to like? I was feeling a little be bewildered by the amount of teams and the quick turn around of players, and I really enjoyed reading a few other football books such as Bloody Sundays so I thought I would order “Every week a season”.

It is amazing to me the amount of commitment that the players and coaches put in to an amateur sport (although I obviously realise the pressure to get an NFL contract drives it beyond the love of the sport). The book is a series of accounts of the author spending a week at a selection of the leading football programs. I found that the author gives a very neutral description of events which is good from the perspective of factual integrity. However the writing is somewhat bland, especially when describing the progress of the football match at the end of each week, and a little passion for the team he is attached to would not go amiss. The book does become slightly repetitive by the end but it is interesting to compare the subtly different approaches of the teams and their head coaches. A big bonus for me is the fact that the book is from the 2003 season, so I recognize a lot of the player names from the current NFL rosters (for example Jonathan Vilma and Fred Gibson). Overall it was an interesting insight into the workings of the teams, but it wasn’t quite the broad overview of the NCAA division 1 football league that I was looking for.