Book Report: Java Concurrency in Practice

I work with the Scala programming language but Scala runs on the JVM, the Java Virtual Machine. This is pretty important. Java turned out to be an icky programming language, but some smart folks have written some darned good APIs for it. Since Scala runs on the JVM, it can use those APIs. So when I want a data structure for my multi-threaded Scala-Finagle web server, I use a Scala ConcurrentMap but that's basically a wrapper around a Java ConcurrentHashMap.

Java Concurrency in Practice is a book by the Java folks who designed ConcurrentHashMap and all those other tasty Java ConcurrentThingies. I didn't finish reading it, though I liked the part that I read. You know how the scary aspect of programming Design Pattern books is when tyro programmers want to use all the design patterns they learned right away? Java Concurrency in Practice made me want to ~~spawn threa~~ start Executors all over the place, when... I'm not really writing that kind of code right now. At work and at home, I work on code where some geniuses have already figured out the multi-threaded web server framework, have already designed the ConcurrentThingies data structures for me to build on top of. All the changes I found myself thinking about were just complecting; I should use the code the geniuses wrote. I put the book down; I know where to find it again if I need it.

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Book Report: Tubes

It's a book about the physical structure of the internet. So you'd expect that I couldn't put it down. But oh man. Early on in the book, there's a sentence

I share all these quotidian details of travel because on that day my senses were unusually attuned to the networks that surround me, both visible and invisible.

I was wondering why did the author share all those details? I suspect that the author added this sentence because his editor asked "Why so much detail here? What does this add?" And the author thought that he should answer the question rather than realizing that the editor was hinting that the $$*#*ing detail was detracting from the book and should go. The quotidian details aren't even about the internet, but about the weather, the... oh man, don't get me started.

Maybe the author didn't learn much about the physical structure of the internet and thought he needed to pad out the book. Maybe the author learned plenty about the internet, but didn't think people wanted to read about it. Maybe this book is mostly full of great information which I'd see if only I hadn't given up on it after a couple of chapters. I guess I'll never know.

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Book Report: Professor Moriarty: the Hound of the D'Urbervilles

What if there were sequels to a bunch of pulp books I never read in which their protagonists confronted Professor Moriarty (of the Sherlock Holmes stories)? Those Sherlock Holmes stories that I thought were OK but which other people like a lot better than I do? Then you'd have this book. I didn't make it very far. I might have found it more compelling if I'd known more about the protagonists of Riders of the Purple Sage whom I was supposed to be rooting for. I might have.

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Book Report: The Corner It's a year in the life of an open-air drug market in Baltimore. Most of the folks in the neighborhood are addicts and/or dealers, and thus most of the folks in this book are, too. I didn't finish re...