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cpython internals

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CPython Internals Book Cover CPython Internals
Anthony Shaw
May 5, 2021
396
★★★★☆

Get your guided tour through the Python 3.9 interpreter: Unlock the inner workings of the Python language, compile the Python interpreter from source code, and participate in the development of CPython. Are there certain parts of Python that just seem like magic? This book explains the concepts, ideas, and technicalities of the Python interpreter in an approachable and hands-on fashion. Once you see how Python works at the interpreter level, you can optimize your applications and fully leverage the power of Python.

I have been paid money to write Python code since about 2006, so I figured it was probably time that I should understand some of the inner workings of Python. I therefore picked up two books on the topic, this one being the first of the two.

This book to be honest isn’t completely what I expected. Its very well written and quite interesting, but its more about the things you’d need to know to become a Python core developer, rather than the things you should know as a user of Python like how the Python dictionary implementation is built.

(If you want that specifically, this video is an excellent introduction).

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Shift

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This is the second book in the Silo series, following on the Wool, which I recently read. I think to a certain extend this book is better than the first one -- I certainly found it compelling. An excellent read that explains how the universe described in Wool came to be, but yet also sets the scene for the third book in the trilogy.

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Solve for Happy

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Solve for Happy Book Cover Solve for Happy
Mo Gawdat
January 10, 2019
368
★★★☆☆

Solve for Happy is a startlingly original book about creating and maintaining happiness, written by a top Google executive with an engineer's training and fondness for thoroughly analyzing a problem.

Mo Gawdat was kind of a big deal, at IBM, Microsoft, and then Google. But he was unhappy, so he decided to take an engineering approach and try to systematically “solve for happy” and work out why adding more money, shiny objects, and adoration of others didn’t actually make him happy.

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Starter Villain

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Now, I might be biased because I like John Scalzi's stuff, but this book was really good. It starts slower than a normal Scalzi book, and takes a couple of chapters to really get going, but I am glad I was patient with it. Apart from that its a quick easy read. Its a typical Scalzi book, light hearted and fun. I think this one requires you suspend disbelief a little harder than others (except perhaps for Redshirts) but that doesn't make it less enjoyable.

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Wool

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Chet bought me this book and demanded I read it, and honestly that was a good call. The book reminds me a bit of  Oryx and Crake, but perhaps that's unfair given I read that one eight years ago and have probably forgotten some important details. The book is well paced and engaging. Despite being as long as many of Neil Stephenson's books, I felt it was a much more approachable read than that. I found the second half of the book a bit harder to read that the first half, because it doesn't pull many punches in terms of the consequences of people's actions and is pretty good at building suspense. There were definitely points where I had to pause because I was pretty sure something bad was going to happen to someone I'd grown fond of. That said, it was still a great read. I've gone and bought the next two in the series because I'm confident I'm going to want to read them now too.

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Understanding Compression

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I bought this book on a whim, because I was trying to understand a compression scheme and had trouble finding good documentation on it. The book overall is written in a quite conversational style that I find a bit distracting from the content, and the introduction is a bit repetitive -- yes I get it, there's some maths involved. Thanks. That said, the content is a solid and quite approchable introduction to the topic area. I haven't ever thought before about entropy in information theory for example, I now feel like I could give a coherent elevator description of the topic. Another example is the description of Huffman codes. Here the topic is introduced with four pages and a few diagrams and I "get it". In the random algorithms book on my shelf (Introduction to Algorithms, third edition by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein), the same content takes ten pages and includes a six page set of lemmas around the code's correctness. Both descriptions would get you there in the end, but Understanding Compression's description is definitely more approachable. Overall, its very rare for me to sit down and actually read a technical book from cover to cover, but this book…

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Cult of the Dead Cow

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A very readable history of the early US hacking scene, including the roots of Def Con and Blackhat security conferences. The book is filled with a cast of characters many of whose names and exploits I recognize -- although I've only met one or two in person. The book is definitely US-centric in it's coverage but an interesting way to spend a summer evening or two. Menn (the author) spends a lot of time working through the moral reasoning that led a group formed out of an interest in how things worked and a sense of community among the socially awkward, to a group that made a profound difference to how we think about responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities and our obligations as technologists while at the same time trying to be funny (the hackers, not the author). The description of how cDc dragged Microsoft kicking and screaming into taking security for their software seriously is both funny and interesting, as well as the discussion of early attempts at responsible disclosure at a time where software vendors would sue instead of fixing their products. I find the descriptions of the various players "going straight" and acquiring actual jobs in order…

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Project Hail Mary

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I enjoyed Andy Weir's two previous books, so I guess it's not a surprise that I enjoyed this one too. I feel like this one is closer to The Martian than to Artemis, so perhaps Weir is finding his sweet spot in terms of content choices. This book follows a school science teacher doing foolhardy things to save both himself and those he loves. It's a bloody good read but I don't want to ruin it for you so I'll leave it there.

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Malware Analyst’s Cookbook and DVD

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Another technical book, this time because my employer lets me buy random technical books as long as I pinky swear to read them and this one sounded interesting and got good reviews. First off, the book is a bit dated given its from 2011 -- there are lots of references to Ubuntu 10.10 for example and they say to avoid Python 3, which has its historical charm. This is unfortunate given the first section of the book talks about setting up honeypots to collect malware to examine, but Dionaea for example had its last commit in 2021. I am left wondering if there are more modern honey pot systems that people use these days. Secondly the book is definitely a cookbook and that's on me for not noticing this about the book before buying it -- its a series of recipes / scripts that do interesting things with malware. That said, it isn't really teaching a cohesive set of skills, its more of a series of stepping stones along the path you might follow. I think that's an unintended piece of important learning -- books with "cookbook" or "recipes" in their title probably aren't very good as an overview of…

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Cisco CyberOps Associate: Official Cert Guide

I don't think I've really reviewed a technical book here before, but I read the thing so I guess I should. This book is the certification guide for a "Cisco CyberOps Associate" certification, which is what they now call the CCNA Security qualification. Its a relatively junior certification, qualifying you to be a level one operator in a Security Operations Centre (SOC). I read this book because I took a Cisco NetAcad course for the associated certification in the second half of 2022 (although it has continued to be a thing I plug away at in 2023). That was mainly motivated by a desire to more about a field that is clearly important, but hasn't been core to my personal career. This book is reasonably well written and readable -- I'd read a chapter in the evening after work and its wasn't a huge chore to churn though. I certainly learned things along the way, even if the certification seems to suffer from a desire to have everyone rote learn a lot of acronyms, which seems like a common ailment in the industry (AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, I'm looking at you). My main critism is of the qualification itself, which…

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