non_fiction

Debugging

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One of the other architects at work was running a reading group for our North American comrades, and I felt left out so I figured I may as well just pick up the book to see what the deal was. This book is a bit old, and was written at the time to try and be funny, but to be honest I don't think the humour has aged well and it makes the book jarring to read. Overall I'd describe the book as having been written in the style of a long form chatty blog post, which is a bit unusual. 90% of the readers of this book will be looking for advice on how to debug software systems, but the book frequently uses hardwaare systems as examples. That speaks to the author's background, but its not super helpful for modern audiences living in a software defined world. The book is also a bit dated in terms of terminology and expectations of the work environment -- for example, the discussion of repeatable testing doesn't mention automated regression testing at all, and the only mention of automated tests is fleeting at best. Another example is that the author recommends that you…

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cpython internals

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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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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.

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Solve for Happy

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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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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.

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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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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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This is going to hurt

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This book is lots of things: honest, funny, and ultimately heart breaking. I don't remember how I came across it, but its a good read for when travelling as the diary format means you can put it down whenever you need to do something else. I'm left wondering how the Australian medical system compares to the NHS -- I know we have more patient choice and flexibility -- but I wonder what its like for those working within the system. Either way I definitely recommend this book.

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Unix: a history and a memoir

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It was a bit surprising to me that Brian Kernighan self-published a book about Unix history with Kindle Direct publishing, but given how many other books he's published he must have his reasons for not using traditional channels for this one. The book is an engaging read, with quotes which still seem timely today popping up every so often. Certainly the decision to self-publish does not appear to have been because of a lack of effort put into the book. An example of a quote I think is still relevant today: "Stable funding was a crucial factor for research. It meant that AT&T could take a long-term view and Bell Labs researchers had the freedom to explore areas that might not have a near-term payoff and perhaps never would. That's a contrast with today's world, in which planning often seems to look ahead only a few months, and much effort is spent on speculating on financial results for the next quarter." (page 7). Kernighan covers his own early career and the general functioning of Bell Labs, before starting to delve into the history of Unix. Describing at a high level early batch processing systems and then Multics, Kernighan describes how…

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The Mythical Man-Month

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I expect everyone (well, almost everyone) involved in some way in software engineering has heard of this book. I decided that it was time to finally read it, largely prompted by this excellent blog post by apenwarr which discusses second systems effect among other things. Now, you can buy this book for a surprisingly large amount of money, but as Michael Carden pointed out, the PDF is also made available for free by the Internet Archive. I’d recommend going that route.

The book is composed of a series of essays, which discuss the trials of the OS/360 team in the mid-1960s, and uses those experiences to attempt to form a series of more general observations on the art of software development and systems engineering.

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The Mythical Man-month Book Cover The Mythical Man-month
Frederick Phillips Brooks, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.,
Computer programming
Reading, Mass. ; Don Mills, Ont. : Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
1975
195

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