Gene Taylor
If you want a single source to get you up to speed on DynamoDB this is not a bad choice.
It provides a run down of the DynamoDB api, advice and examples of common use cases and
also provides background on how DynamoDB works behind the scenes.
That being said, I would not pay money for this book (I had access via a subscription service). By 2016 this is already starting to feel a bit out of date as it has not been updated to reflect the changes made to DynamoDB in the past couple of years.
Also everything in this book is available elsewhere, a lot of it was just collated from the documentation provided by Amazon. The behind the scenes was just a summary of the Dynamo paper, and at least one sentence has clearly been ripped from Wikipedia.
Off the books is an engaging account of life in and around the underground economy in an American ghetto. The author, Sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh , spent a large amount of time in the Chicago Southside neighborhood of Marquis Park, establishing relationships with residents and observing their daily life. This provided him with the ability to write a fly on the wall account of the web of exchange in the neighborhood that is occurring outside of the formal economy.The ghetto presents a range of opportunities for off the books work. Drug dealing and prostitution are obvious underworld activities, but the book details the surprising breadth of ways people hustle to make a dollar or two. One man has a niche doing minor car repairs in alleyways while another shines shoes and helps squatters find a place to stay for a fee. A Homeless man might be payed a few dollars to watch a store a night, while for a fee the local preacher may mediate your dispute. The neighborhood is severely lacking in opportunities for traditional employment so the underground economy is an tied to residents doing what they can to just get by.The books consist of chapters focusing on differing aspects on the underground economy: the household, entrepreneurship, street hustlers, preachers, the local gang.These chapters are anchored by a cast of recurring residents like James Arleander the homeless mechanic who does car repairs in alleyways and Marlene Matteson, the president of the local block club.While the books is very local in the focus, Marquis park is tied back to larger scale economic and political trends. One example of this is a very interesting discussion on how the entrenched poverty of neighborhoods like marquis park was in part an unintended consequence of the successes of civil rights movement. Similarly there the chapter on the local preachers provided a short political history of Chicago and the role preachers played in the movement leading to the election of the city's first black mayor Harold Washington.I picked up this book wanting get a better understanding of the kind of urban poverty fictionalized in television shows like The Wire. Marquis Park is a real place, populated by real people, who have to struggle in numerous ways just to get by. The book is in Chicago rather than a fictionalized Baltimore,but it is a very recognizable neighborhood. In terms of increasing your understanding this goes further than something like [b:The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood 1234171 The Corner A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood David Simon https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328047452s/1234171.jpg 20297]as into the larges scale forces that helped to create and sustain the ghetto. For any prospective readers I recommend that you go into this book with realistic expectations of what you are about to read. This was written by a Columbia University Academic and published by the Harvard University Press. This book is not a page turner. While the material covered is quite interesting, there are a number of quite slow moving sections. Similarly the author has a habit of repeating some passages almost verbatim which would most likely have been cleaned up if the book was written with a popular audience in mind. The author does write clearly and there is no academic jargon so this book should be accessible provided you have a little bit of perseverance.
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.
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.
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.
A good survey course on the history of the Ottoman empire. It covers ~700 years of history from the pre ottoman Turkic states all the way to the collapse of the empire and the foundation of the modern republic of Turkey. With such a large scope the course does not have time to cover each topic in great depth, but what is presented gives you a good introduction to the history.
If you already have a good background in Ottoman history then this course might not cover anything new but I think that is to be expected from a survey course by the Great Courses.
This volume is much more focused that the first installment. Centering around the detective Vivek Headland as he investigates a case involving a very peculiar ham sandwich. Headland is a fun take on a Homes-esque detective, so I was more than happy that this arc was mostly centered around him. We get an case involving mystic cults, the philosophers stone and plenty of Ellis's distinctive dialogue.
Injection was envisaged as a series of trade paper backs and it shows, this features a satisfying single story arc. Volume 2 is where we start to get some of the payoff from the first volumes worldbuilding.
By the end of it this arc the reader is left with a clearer idea of what the Injection is and what it has been up to and most importantly why we should care.
Assuming this volume is the model for future arcs I eagerly anticipate when we get to see volume 3.
This is a history of existentialism (and phenomenology) told through the lives of the movement's major figures. Loosely centred on Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir in Paris and Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, we are taken on crisscrossing tale of people and ideas.
The book follows a largely biographical narrative that is interspersed with explanations of the philosophy. Blackwell does a very good job of explaining this in a way that is understandable to the general reader. Considering how obtuse some of the primary texts are this is quite impressive, it is not easy to give a clear presentation of Heidegger.
The philosophy alone would mean that this is a good primer on existentialism, but this also offers an engaging story about the lives of the people who wrote it. They lived during interesting times and lead flawed and colourful lives. Sartre with his support of morally questionable communist regimes and Heidegger with his Nazi sympathies show us “that human existence is difficult and that people often behave appallingly, yet they also show how great our possibilities are.”
I found Injection to be a bit of a slow burn. It has to establish the 5 former members of the CCCU, build the world and establish the rules. We get hints at a lot of thing including the Injection, Breakers yard as well as the ongoing techno weirdness.
The sheer volume of things in play meant that this volume was somewhat lacking focus, a lot of things are thrown at the reader at the start, drawing dots to be connected later.
We have a team of damaged characters who are starting to come together so they can clean up the mess from The Bad Things they did in the past. This has all of the seeds for a great Warren Ellis story so I willing to trust that the future payoff will be worth the slow start.
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.
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.