Eli Bendersky's website New books:
- "Linchpin" by Seth Godin - what could be a great blog post, turned into a repetitive 230-page book. Still worth a read, however.
- "The New Turing Ombibus" by A. K. Dewdney - 66 short sections on various aspects of computer science. I should have known in advance I won't like it - the scope is too wide. Not badly written, but in reality quite a useless book in these days of Wikipedia.
- "Strength In What Remains" by Tracy Kidder - the first 2/3 of the book is very good and it should've ended there. The last 1/3 is a bit tiresome and perhaps unnecessary. The author should really have spent more time on that clinic right in the end than babble on and on about Deo's memories in various places.
- "Goddess of the market" by Jennifer Burns - a biography of Ayn Rand. On the good side, it presents things in a very objective way, providing interesting insights on some valid arguments against Ayn Rand. On the bad side, it focuses more on Objectivism's political consequences than on its philosophical importance. Overall a nice read.
- "Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran - Packs an incredible amount of information into a relatively compact book - a lot of very useful algorithms for common problems of machine learning. What I liked less is the "ad-hoc"-ish un-idiomatic Python code.
Re-reads:
- "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo
- "The seven daughters of Eve" by Bryan Sykes
- "The journey of man" by Spencer Wells
- "Flow – the psychology of optimal experience" by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi