Reviews and Comments

This took me forever to get through. At least three months. As the author admits, TILs are a real bear to wrap your head around because they involve so many independent moving parts. Loeliger does a great job of giving a high-level and low-level explanation of the entire sequence of events, but I'd still be in awe of anyone who could simply read this book straight through and actually GROK how it all works together. Maybe if you work out some of it on paper as well?

But that's fine. This book will guide you through creating your own TIL (or Forth-like language). And if you do that, you'll get it. My own journey involved porting a Forth (JONESFORTH) from one flavor of x86 assembly language to another (AT&T style GAS to Intel style NASM).

If you have a Z80 processor lying around, this book contains a complete implementation (well, I assume it's complete), so you're good to go! Otherwise, you can use it as a guide and essentially "port" the Z80 code to whatever architecture you're using.

As an object, there is something strangely beautiful about a lot of old computer books. I think it's the typography. This one is a pleasing size, as well - it's a hardback, but of the smaller variety. And the airbrushed cover illustration is a really nice touch.

As I write my review, this book is 15 years old. Which is a very long time in computer language years. But I think this is still a completely useful way to get up to speed on Ruby. I love how it jumps right into useful stuff with file and directory manipulation. I'm also really impressed with the way that Marick managed to organize the book into chapters that not only built on each other, but introduced the features you're less likely to need on a frequent basis (like writing your own modules) at the end.

Highly recommend for any beginner to programming or anyone just wanting to get up to speed on Ruby quickly (or a refresher). Don't worry about idiomatic Ruby usage or the content being up-to-date. You can pick that stuff up as you get more experience with the language.

Edit: Actually, you know what? I'm gonna bump this up to 5 stars because I do recommend this book to people and what else might you expect from a beginner's tutorial?

Weighing in a hundreds of famous names and short quips about people, places, and showbiz trivia for which I have little context (my VHS rental habits ran more "Alien Laser Fight Vampires"), there was no reason for this to be even remotely enjoyable to me.

But Allen can write. He's also incredible at amazing one-liners. (WAIT, is that just a computer programming thing, or do we also describe single-sentence jokes that way too? I can't even remember and now I don't want to look it up because I like the idea that short, self-contained programs and short, self-contained jokes have the same name and I didn't realize it until now.) There aren't a lot of jokes in this book, but a couple caught me off guard and one in particular made me chortle out loud.

I have no idea what possessed me to read this. The last I'd heard about Woody Allen was decades ago when it was said that he had, "married his own adopted daughter." Turns out that's not a fair (or accurate, in any legal sense) description of what happened and he even says, "there are still people out there who think I married my own adopted daughter." And I'm like, "well, there you go."

Allen has a pretty alien way of looking at the world and at himself. He comes off as sweetly naive and I don't get the impression he's written about himself in a calculating way. It feels very raw and honest. But it also needs an editor something fierce. There are several occasions where he repeats himself almost word-for-word and some of it comes across as pretty tone deaf. But I heard the text in his voice where the rawness and imperfection works.

Rucker rules! As a math noob, this has been very insightful and helpful, not because I'm going to be able to rush out and use any of the information here (like I've been able to with my recent incursions into linear algebra), but because it completely opened my eyes to the connections between various branches of "higher mathematics." Beyond that, it's been a taste of what it's like to actually THINK about mathematical concepts beyond what I have thought about before (which is basic computation and a tiny bit of number theory).

Bonus points for helping me finally start to grasp logarithms and what they might be for, which is a subject that has frustrated me to no end since the "Big O" notation (classifying the rate at which an algorithm will expend resources as you increase the number of things you shove into it) in computer science. And for Rucker's fearless use of ordinary conversational English and his humble and honest opinions.

Oh, and additional bonus points for being able to tie the five subjects together in a way that really did have lightbulbs going off in my head. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a taste of the interesting mathematical fields and how they relate!

Also, a little shocking fact: this book helped me realize that I actually do not enjoy mathematical logic. Which is bizarre since I'm a computer guy and computers are, at the circuit level, nothing but logic. Hmm.

This is not an amazing book by any means - but if you're into the Forth language/ecosystem like I am right now, it's pretty high on the list of things to read. It's Moore's own explanation of: 1) What he built, 2) How he reasons about a self-bootstrapping programming language (namely, Forth), and 3) His general philosophy of software development.

I gotta say, while you can argue about how Forth helps or hurts the cause, his First Principle of keeping it simple is spot on! And he's practical about it too.

I like that we get an opinionated take on a variety of topics such as the pros and cons of word (function) name lookup strategies, etc. I love how practical he is about complexity vs. storage concerns vs. compute time concerns.

It's a bit rambling and meandering and is not a highly professional and polished book. According to the introduction, it's a manuscript that essentially sat in a drawer for decades. A later chapter even has a note that goes something like: "I'm not sure why I thought this part was needed, but here it is anyway..." Which I enjoy. Moore is human too!

Very good! The whole first half was superb children's mystery fiction. DWJ has such a unique way of revealing information in ways that are sort of twists and sort of in front of you the whole time. The setting and humor were completely enchanting (while always containing an element of danger and unease).

I think another huge strength in her fiction is the way her characters are all motivated by totally different things. It's realistic in a way that can be jarring and sometimes even upsetting. It makes the stories compelling because often you have NO IDEA what a character will do. But when they do, it makes sense.

It turns out that the premise of the book is pretty wild and the ending...would take some re-readings to properly decide if I like it or not. (Honestly, I shouldn't be putting ratings on anything I haven't read at least twice. But there's so many books to read, so I just plow on to the next one.) Anyway, I'm not ready to stamp this with five stars, but only because I think I liked the first half better than the second half, even when less was happening.

Incredible! This took me half a year to read because it's dense and huge. The scope is enormous and the footnotes and citations are all worthy of pursuit. I simply couldn't absorb more than a couple pages at a sitting. It was exactly the thing I needed to get a survey of the techniques and tools used in distributed, fault-tolerant systems that need to run at scale.

I was extremely impressed that Kleppmann didn't merely explain why you would need to solve a particular problem and what each tool did, but also how (at a high level, of course, or it would have been 100 times longer). I've heard of most of the systems mentioned (e.g. Apache Kafka), but never had a clear understanding of why/what/how they would be used. Now I do. Again, the scope is astounding.

It also really helped me put into words the challenges of trying to make "online" transaction systems do the work of "batch" analytic systems. Those are two very antiquated computing terms, but that only highlights that the problems of the 1960s are the exact same problems of today - only the expectations have shifted. We expect to be able to do more now...even when it flies in the face of hard physical realities.

The exact tools mentioned herein will come and go, but I don't see the basic principles changing that much in the coming decades. These are problems we've been struggling with for the entire lifetime of computing. This book is a treasure. Highly recommended for any developer who would like to learn about large-scale systems.