Reviews and Comments

I've always been curious about the reverence and mystery with which Turing machines get mentioned, and if you want to say you've read the words from the man himself, this is the only way I'd suggest doing it.

The Annotated Turing is precisely as advertised, a walk through the very paper Turing wrote for his thesis, errors and all. While I would have never been able to climb that mountain without a serious amount of background information, here we get the guidance of Mr. Petzold, our sherpa of mathematics, and what excellent guidance it is.

While I could not bring myself to understand the full complexities of the paper, The Annotated Turing takes it step by step, passage by passage and provides illuminating background and context, as well as clarifying Turing's intent and straight up fixing a decent number of typographical errors.

I feel like I need another read of this to understand how the minutiae of the machines translates into the overall findings of the paper, the creation/discovery of a conceptual computer that is not only programmable but is a generalized computer and one that can solve any problem solvable by a computer. A wonderful and informative book, written with obvious love for the subject.

"Learning Functional Programming in Go" Chapter 2 "Manipulating Collections" mini-review: chapter 2 weighs in at 40 pp, and is nominally about manipulating collections using standard functional tools such as Map and Reduce. Before it can, however, it has to lay some groundwork. It begins by defining functional terms like intermediate- and terminal-functors. One of the things I'm hoping to get from this book is a command of functional terms and concepts, and the book spends a lot of time ensuring that you understand the functional principles in those terms.

Unfortunately, we run into one of the core issues with the subject matter, which is that Go doesn't support two of the three elements that the author cites as foundational for FP; tail-call optimization and generics (the third being itertools-style map/reduce). Well, generics are now part of the language, and fortunately he does discuss what generic solutions might look like, so that leaves TCO.

Unfortunately again, however, the author states that TCO is perhaps the most important of the three. It's admirable that the author takes the time to illustrate how TCO works with Haskell instead. This necessarily adds a lot of mental overhead for a Go book, but the author is committed.

The chapter continues with coverage of itertools-like libraries, then a bit about the library favored by the author, Gleam. This is fairly standard stuff for beginner FP, but the author adds an informed opinion about the state of FP-oriented libraries and the performance considerations of different approaches, such as reflection.

Lots to cover in chapter 2, but I didn't come away feeling I had a grasp on anything I'm ready to put into production code yet.

One other note is that this book is showing its age not only in the discussion of generics, but also in that the author had to put in a note about Gleam having majorly changed its approach from LuaJIT.

It has actually been quite some time since I read this book, and my review is for an edition prior to the current release, so there is probably material there which I haven't seen.

This has to be the best book I've seen covering the Ruby language from a practitioner's point of view. The basics would be to cover the major features of the language with some demonstration code. This book covers the language exhaustively, really going through every nook and cranny. At the same time, it does an excellent job of being readable, relatable, and adequately explaining the mental models necessary to really understand what he's talking about.

One thing you may be looking for that you would not find in this book is discussion of the Rails framework for Ruby. This book deals solely with the Ruby language underlying that popular framework. If you're looking to understand Ruby on Rails, this is still a fine book to start with if you have no experience with the language, but other books (such as Rails In Action from Manning) deal with the Rails framework specifically.