Ich habe nach 20 Jahren festgestellt, daß das Scheibenweltbuch "Gevatter Tod" nicht in meinem Bücherregal steht. Nicht im echten und auch nicht in meiner Calibre-Datenbank.
Also hab ich die alte Version bei Medimops bestellt. Beim Auspacken kam mir das Cover des Buches ziemlich bekannt vor, und tatsächlich:
Heyne hat hier aus welchen Gründen auch immer das Coverbild von "Macbest" bei "Gevatter Tod" benutzt. Sachen gibt's.
Swati Iyer from Packt Publishing offered me a free copy of Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 in exchange for a review on my blog. I got the book, I read it, and here is the review.
"Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management" is a book about - phpMyAdmin. phpMyAdmin is a tool that most web developers use on a daily basis and know in and out. The existing knowledge about PMA is the hurdle that will make most devs refrain from buying the book; 75% of the information presented in the book was already in my head, having used PMA for over half a dozen years now.
Interestingly, the book still contained things that I didn't know and that are noteworthy. For example, I never heard about the multi-table query generator. Other aspects I didn't know about or only sketchily:
The last thing that really excited me was the foreign key dropdowns when using the pma-based linked table infrastructure. Surely I had already seen the dropdowns, played around with and used them, but I never knew that one could customize the format. And, what's way cooler, is that - if there are too much items for the dropdown (number configurable) - you'll get a "browsable foreign-table window" popup! Really nifty.
So I learned something new about phpMyAdmin while reading the book. It's a book for lazy train rides when you don't like to switch on your laptop. The book is 35 US$, so with the low Dollar today, it's a cheap buy for Europeans (and probably becoming cheaper over the next months). If you need it, and if you didn't get enough tips by reading this article.
Yesterday, 3 months after beginning, I finished reading Neal Stephenson's Anathem. At first the book scared me and my anticipation to read by having 900 pages on nearly A4 size, and by builing up its own language. I'm no native english speaker, so I partly have problems knowing all normal words - not to speak of new ones that are only valid in the book.
I read about the book at Telepolis and gave it a try even though the German version wasn't anywhere near to expect soon. So the first couple 100 pages were really hard, but even then the story fascinated me enough to keep on reading. At first I only read it in the evenings in bed, but then I put it into my rucksack, reading on the train on the way to and from work (half an hour each). Some weeks later, I stopped doing things on my laptop on the train and only read..
Now that it's over, and the story got really - positively - weird, I can only recommend the book to anyone interested into technology mixed into a good novel. I heard that Neal Stephenson's previous books were not some of the better ones, but this was definitely worth the time spent reading on it.
Here is a list of books I suggest for reading.
Books I heard to be interesting.
The list will be updated if necessary. Tell me about others.