Gene Taylor

Sapiens sets itself the hard task of giving an account of all of Human evolution in under 500 pages. Unfortunately this really is not enough space to do the subject justice, and instead we get an idiosyncratic account of Harari considers to be important points.

The book starts out strongly with a good discussion of prehistory, from the early hominids through to the stone age. From here we get presentation of the agricultural revolution where the author has an axe to grind, as he think that agriculture was a trap and possibly the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.

From here on out we presented with rather sweeping accounts of the highlights of human history, but there is not space for any nuance in the presentation, we simple get the authors account with no real indication when is presenting the accepted view vs him just putting forward his own thoughts. Harari has a tendency to put forward exaggerated or very speculative accounts without making it clear to the reader that this is the case. The impact of this goes from merely annoying if you happen to already know something about that subject to potentially misleading if the reader was going in with no background on the subject. More importantly this undermines your confidence in his presentations of areas you are not as familiar with.

This is not to say the book is a write off. The book does start out strongly and is a fun read if you are prepared to take what the author is saying with a pinch of salt.

The City and the City is the best kind of imaginative fiction. It has one central idea and it gives it enough room to properly explore.

The book follows Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel extreme crime squad as he investigates a body that was dumped in the streets of his City. At its core this is a police procedural following Borlu as he goes about the investigation. But that is not why you want to read this book. This book is really about the setting, the city of Besźel and the city of Ul Qoma...

This is not to say the novel is not enjoyable at the level of a police procedural, it is, watching Borlú put together the case is a satisfying experience. It is just that the investigation of the setting is much more interesting territory than a murder investigation.

I am drawn again to my conclusion that a Fascist is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.

This is a book that was written explicitly in response to Trump. Former secretary of State Madeleine Albright is concerned about some of the challenges facing democracies across the world as well as within the United States and wants to tell you about it. The book itself is aimed at a popular audience and required no particular background knowledge, it is a fairly breezy read.

In terms of content this book has some autobiographical framing and then is really a book of 3 parts

1. Historical Context setting giving a overview of the rise and fall of the classical fascist regime's in Nazi germany and Mussolini's Italy.


2. A whirlwind tour of failed democracies/places with rising authoritarianism in the 20th Century.
This covers

* Hugo Chávez & Maduro in Venezuala,
* Ergodan in Turkey
* Putin in Russia
* North Korea
* Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland and Orbán in Hungary

The fact that this book was written by a former United States Secretary of State does add something to what would otherwise be standard fare. She has been in the room where it happens and has personally met some of the actors, so you get little tidbits like her opinions of Putin from the very first time they met, similarly we get a bit of a play by play of some of the diplomacy that went down with North Korea during the Clinton administration.


3. The back half of the book on Trump and why she is so worried by him:

Trump is the first anti-democratic president in U.S. history. On too many days, beginning in the early hours, he flaunts his disdain for democratic institutions, the ideals of equality and social justice, civil discourse, civic virtues, and America itself.

“I fear a return to the international climate that prevailed in the 1920s and '30s, when the United States withdrew from the global stage and countries everywhere pursued what they perceived to be their own interests without regard to larger and more enduring goals.”

Years from now, we may look back on Trump as a onetime oddity who taught us a lesson we will not forget about the quirks of democracy. We may also look back on him as the agent of a political fracturing from which it will take decades to recover, during which every president will fail because the only candidates elected are those who make promises impossible to keep.

This book contains a number of practical techniques for dealing with legacy code, ie code lacking sufficient test coverage. In particular it has a lot of approaches for breaking dependencies so that you can get a single unit of functionality under test.

I found that I had already been exposed to a number of techniques in the book, however this is not something I hold against. The techniques solve real problems encountered in day to day development and were quite possibly picked up from colleagues who had previously read this.

Hopefully modern code will be written in such a way that you dont need to use any of these techniques, but it useful to have them in your toolbox and know you can refer back to it on that day you get tasked with making changes to a legacy system.

Contains a clear introduction to what regular expressions are and how to use them. It also covers common pitfalls when working with
regexes like explosive backtracking and the platform specific differences in behavior. For this reason, we are shown the solution expressions for the following languages - C#, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET.

Contains (100+) examples for most of the common regular expression use cases like validating email addresses, parsing a Common Log Format file, or extracting a query from a URL. This is a good reference to keep on hand for finding solutions to common problems that can be solved via regular expressions.