Summary of reading: October - December 2019

  • "What If?" by Randall Munroe - the author attemps to provide "serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions", mixed with a large dose of typical XKCD humor and comics. Fun book.
  • "Serious Cryptography" by Jean-Philippe Aumasson - a modern introduction to cryptography covering real-world algorithms and implementations. What sets this book apart from the classical crypto texts is the modern treatment of practical vulnerabilities, attacks and workarounds. The author rightly presents the process of applying crypto as an arms race between implementers and attackers, and in many cases discusses how implementations are hardened against specific attacks. The book covers a lot of material in just over 250 pages, so it doesn't go very deep on each topic; for a deeper understanding of the algorithms and attacks one has to turn elsewhere.
  • "A Russian Journal" by John Steinbeck - a trip report by Steinbeck and the photographer Robert Capa, touring the Soviet Union in 1947. Very nice, light reading in Steinbeck's unmistakable tone.
  • "Grant" by Ron Chernow - a massive, comprehensive biography of Ulysses S. Grant. Excellent writing - for ~1100 pages reading this book was surprisingly easy and fun to read. Very good historical background of the times in which Grant was active as a General and the army and later as President.
  • "Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve" by Ben Blatt - the author picked up Python and NLTK and went on to analyze hundreds of classic books and modern bestsellers for various patterns and statistics. Short, fun read for literature fans.
  • "Let's Go!" by Alex Edwards - building web applications in Go. Pretty good book with a lot of useful material and code for building a non-trivial web application from the ground up - inlcuding sessions, authorization, DB state, HTTPS and some security measures (like CSRF protection). I appreciated the book's pragmatic approach and attention to detail (nice chapter on testing!). I would prefer the author used fewer dependencies to implement the app, though, as it would help learn the basics better. Some dependencies (like pat) add very little and don't even seem to be maintained any more. I do realize it's a delicate balance to strike, though. While some of the stylistic choices are questionable (improper structure of comments, using *_test.go files for non-test utility code, etc.), by and large the code is clean and idiomatic.
  • "Implementing SSL/TLS" by Joshua Davies - this book has a complete implementation of TLS (version 1.2) with a focus on HTTPS, in C. It includes the implementation of the cryptographic protocols involved - from scratch; even parsing of certificates. Amazingly diligent work by the author, no doubt. It also covers the cryptography needed, but not in much depth - so you'll probably need a companion crypto book if you really want to understand the algorithms and attacks in depth. The book feels slightly dated because it was released in 2010 and focuses mostly on TLS 1.1; it does mention 1.2 and adjust its implementation for it, but mostly as an after-thought - because the use of 1.2 wasn't widespread yet at the time. It would be really nice to see an updated version written with TLS 1.3 in mind. All in all, this is a very useful resource for understanding TLS - writing all the implementation down really forced the author to cover every detail.
  • "What you should know about politics... but don't" by Jessamyn Conrad - secondary title "A nonpartisan guide to the issues that matter". A very good book about the current state of American politics (relevant to early 2016), patiently discussing the variety of issues that the US faces and how the different political parties address them. The author mostly succeeds in making this book an objective, nonpartisan account, which increases its value significantly.
  • "Aha! Gotcha: Paradoxes to Puzzle and Delight" by Martin Gardner - I remember fondly browsing Gardner's books as a kid, so I decided to get one to go through together with my daughter. It's a nice book, though the levels of the paradoxes vary wildly, requiring anywhere from elementary counting to at least high-school level math. It's a fun format for the kids because of the comics presenting each paradox.
  • "The Nazi Hunters" by Neal Bascomb - a story of Adolf Eichmann's capture in Argentina and clandestine transport to Israel by the Mossad. This book is written for "young adults" (I grabbed it from the local library while browsing with my kids) but it's actually very engaging and interesting for adults as well. In fact, I found the writing style to be refreshingly straightforward, focusing on telling the story without unnecessary embellishments.
  • "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk" by Peter L. Bernstein - an opinionated history of probability and calculating risks, with a focus on applications to investment. Tedious and not very interesting, IMHO.
  • "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr - a beautifully written novel about the lives of a blind French girl and a German boy during WWII.
  • "The Disappearing Spoon" by Sam Kean - a popular science book about the periodic table, its discovery and some prominent elements. I read the young readers edition with my kids. Fairly entertaining, though likely more useful for kids with more formal exposure to science (like middle-school science lessons).
  • "The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution" by Gregory Zuckerman - the story of Simons's famous quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies. Good writing, but precious few details on the one question everyone is actually interested in - how do these funds work, and what mathematical techniques they use. Sure, most of this stuff is secret, but I would expect at least some older know-hows to be public by now. Alas, there's almost none of this here - you could congest all it says about the actual quantitative methods into barely a page. But hey, if you're really into a tabloid-like coverage of these folks' private lives, yachts, poker games, political involvement and internal feuds - this book will deliver.
  • "Infinite Powers" by Steven Strogatz - good, but not great book about the origins of calculus, attempting to explain its foundations intuitively (though still requiring at least high-school level math).
  • "Change is the only constant: the wisdom of Calculus in a madcap world" by Ben Orlin - the author mentioned his original attempt at this book was a more traditional introduction to Calculus using his comic style, but he gave it up and went for story-telling itself. Thus, this book has very little math in it, and mostly is humorously narrated and drawn stories with some Calculus connections. I can see where this could be useful for math educators, but not sure about myself and general readership. It's a quick and fun book to read, but if you're interested in the actual math I'd say Strogatz's "Infinite Powers" is better.
  • "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West" by Stephen Ambrose - a detailed account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Combines a fun-to-read travel log with a fascinating snapshot of frontier America in the early 19th century. Excellent book overall.

Re-reads:

  • "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" by Paul Hoffman
  • "The history of the Supreme Court" by Peter Irons
  • "Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life" by Annette Lareau

For comments, please send me an email.