Book Review (September/2008)

Recently i had finish 2 very interesting books. The book is fictional novel call “Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini. Wow!, it was really a good and a sad book to read. The reason why i think it is the best fiction book that i ever read this year because :

1. The contents and the words that the author used, were not very depth and complex. It is easy to understand unlike others’ novel. (Hey, i’m not going to pick every single words that i do not know and refer to dictionary. That’s the point why i read novel to release my stress and frustration).

2. The author kept remind the reader what was happened before, so that the reader can kept track the important point while you reach end of each chapters.

3.Ah!!Like the book mention, irony.

4.Sad content and a bit of romance. Nice!!

The second book will be techinal book which is “The Practice of Programming” by Brian W. Kernigham and Rob Pike. I WISH i had known this book when i started programming in 1st year of my Comp Science. Very interesting and useful for any level of programmers. This book manly focus on c,c++ and Java programming languages. But, the thing is, it is not programming languages that the reader should concerned. You can apply the way their teach in any programming language.

I will totally kept one of my list books around me when i do programming. One of the book that wannabe “Good” programmer should have.

Book review #2

[Follow-up from previous post]

Technical Book

Web Services : Author by Gustavo Alonso, Fabio Casati, Harumi Kuno, and Vijay Machiraju.

Comment : This book is really good for people who are new to web services and references as well. It explain the history of System architecture to current web services. Since this book is kind like a bit extreme technical like RFC specification and no practical solution at all. It introduce SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, 1 to N tier architecture, web service compsition, BPEL, WS-Security, WS-transaction, WS-routing, and more ws-*.

The first 1-4 chapters were about the enterprise system era before web services was introduced. You can got a big picture why integration and interoperability was so hard at that era.
Chapter 5-6, slowly walk through the needs of web services and chapter 7-9 were mainly about web service composition and BPEL was introduced.

Although i finish reading this book, i only get half of its content because this book was too technical for beginner. You had to understand each design behind the system before proceed to the next chapters. If you want to learn web services and don’t know where to start, then this book might help you.

Book Review (April/2008)

I had been set target to read 1 books within 1 months which balance out ratio of 2:1 technical books and novels. Here is the list which i had finish reading and unfinished reading as well.

Finish Reading

Non-technical book

Digital Fortress : Author by Dan Brown (1999).

Comment : This book was quite interesting and fascinating which i think the combination of action and a bit of romance. The main character which I assume were Susan Fletcher the genius NSA Head Crypto and her fiance David Becker. This book mention a little inside of NSA. Since this was a fiction-based novel, of course there were several mistakes based on encryption and impossible crypto machine knowns TRANSLTR. The thing that i don’t like this book was, several scene seems kept repeating itself. For example, when it said that the commander (one of the characters of the novel) mention he wanted to go to shut down the “Impossible Machine” but it seems like it kept continue on and said, “Ok, Now i will be going down to shut it down”. I though you (Commander) already said that like few chapters before. Anyway, this is a really good book which i think only for person who interested and work in IT field.

Plot Twist
“Susan Fletcher, a brilliant mathematician and head of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) cryptography division, finds herself faced with an unbreakable code named “Digital Fortress”, which is resistant to brute-force attacks by the NSA’s 3 million processor supercomputer dubbed “TRANSLTR”. The code is written by Japanese cryptographer Ensei Tankado, a fired employee of the NSA, who is displeased with the agency’s intrusion into people’s privacy. Tankado auctions the algorithm on his website, threatening that his accomplice “North Dakota” will release the algorithm for free if he dies. Tankado is found dead in Seville, Spain. Fletcher, along with her fiancé, David Becker, a skilled linguist with eidetic memory, must find a solution to stop the spread of the code.”
References from Wikipedia.