Summary of reading: October - December 2010

"Kafka on the shore" by Haruki Murakami - Although this book is full of the supernatural, I enjoyed reading it. It's very well written - a non-typical page turner, with several developed and interesting characters. I was somewhat disappointed in the end, however, since I hoped things would clarify more than they actually did. I feel that Murakami left too many loose ends there, whether on purpose or not.
"Large-Scale C++ Software Design" by John Lakos - Now here's a book that shows its age. Written when CFRONT was the most popular C++ compiler, the book ignores namespaces (which weren't widely supported at the time), advising to use C-style prefixes instead. It's also oblivious to IDEs or at least some Vi/Emacs + ctags combination, teaching to grep through code. Although there are some very good parts in it (in particular chapter 5 with its concrete examples of decoupling, and the general idea of thinking in terms of components), most of the book is very tedious and repetitive. I frankly don't think it's worth the time invested into reading all of it. For a good sample, read the intro on components and then chapter 5.
"Sefarad" by Antonio Muñoz Molina (read in Spanish) - A collection of short stories, mostly about the persecution of Jews in Europe by the Nazis before and during WWII, and about people in the Soviet Union hunted by the regime after the war. The stories vary in quality - some are very hard to follow.
"Son of Hamas" by Mosab Hassan Yousef (read in Hebrew) - The author is the eldest son of one of Hamas's founders - Sheikh Hassan Yousef. He tells his story of growing up in Ramallah in the 1970s and 1980s, and how he became a Shin Bet agent undercover in the Hamas leadership. The book is not bad overall, although I found the writing somewhat naive.
"Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk" by Paul Duvall, Steve Matyas, Andrew Glover - Covers CI quite well from all possible angles. While parts of the book were definitely interesting and worth a read, I think CI is just not a large enough topic to justify a 350+ page book. So it's quite repetitive and a bit tedious. A long, succinct article would probably be more suitable.
"One wish to the right" by Eshkol Nevo (read in Hebrew) - an enjoyable novel about a group of friends living their lives in Israel in the 1990s and early 2000s.