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Author: matthew

Watch the Seasons Change

Over the past year, I took a series of phone camera pictures out the window of the break room at work. I wasn’t consistent in where I held my phone while I took the pictures, and I didn’t take one every day. Even so, it is kind of fun. My friend, Jussi, was kind enough to create the animated GIFs. There are two versions and the only difference is the speed at which the images change. Slow Speed And now, a few random words to provide a little separation between the two images to make them each less distracting from…

Beautiful LEGO

This review will be short, but that is because the book is an easy sell. Usually a book sits on my desk for a week or two (or six) before I have time to read and review it. This one arrived today. I opened the envelope and was engrossed. Thankfully, I didn’t have anything else to do for a while. Beautiful LEGO is a stunning coffee table book filled with astounding images of amazing things created with LEGO. This isn’t a “how-to” book, this is an inspirational book and a conversation piece. Here are some examples. If you like these, buy…

DevOps Troubleshooting

Have you ever been responsible for a server and had something go wrong? Ever been in a situation where you didn’t know what was causing the problem or how to figure it out? I think any of us who develop code, work in quality assurance, or administer systems have had this sort of experience. Sometimes problems appear that were never covered in a class or training session. Experience is an amazing teacher, but gaining that experience can be intimidating and sometimes painful. This book gives anyone working in DevOps a bit of a head start. DevOps Troubleshooting: Linux Server Best…

The LEGO Build-It Book: Amazing Vehicles

LEGO. There, I got the attention of a large number of you. The LEGO Build-It Book: Amazing Vehicles is the first volume in a new series from No Starch Press that is intended to give anyone ages 7 and older some ideas of things they can build or modify using LEGO. The 10 projects in this book are ranked by complexity, functions, and required pieces. The introduction page for each project includes design notes, technical specifications, and beautiful pictures of each finished product to whet the appetite. There is also a pretty neat section on advanced building with some useful…

The Healthy Programmer

I sit at a desk all day. I sit with my hands on a keyboard or mouse and my eyes fixed on a computer screen. This is a terrible thing to do to one’s body. I learned this first hand when, just over two years ago, I developed wrist and back pain so severe I nearly chose a different career. Instead, I talked to a doctor, read up on ergonomics and repetitive stress injuries, and made some significant changes to how I work. I wish this book had existed back then, and better yet that I had read the book…

Nginx HTTP Server, Second Edition

I reviewed the first edition of this book back in 2010 (see: Nginx HTTP Server). To be honest, that review was lukewarm and one of the reasons I started thinking about whether I would continue to review every book sent to me or whether I should be more choosy. I decided nearly two years later to be more choosy. Nginx HTTP Server, Second Edition is an improvement over the first edition. Some of the shortcomings I pointed out have been addressed. The unnecessary chapter about basic Linux commands is gone, for example. The space was filled by expanding the Nginx-specific…

Realm of Racket

This is not my first review of a book that covers a dialect of Lisp (see: Land of Lisp). That is because I am not alone in believing that learning Lisp makes you a better programmer, even if you never use it for any official project or paid job. This is also not my first review of a book that is intended for young programmers. That is because I think learning a programming language is a useful skill worthy of pursuit, even if you never use it for anything but fun. Realm of Racket was written by a group of…

Day Against DRM at O’Reilly Media

Today at O’Reilly Media, save 50% on all Ebooks and Videos to celebrate Day Against DRM, including one of my books, VMware Cookbook.

Mastering NGINX

Nginx is an http server intended for high traffic websites with a mind toward network scalability. I used NGINX as my primary web server for about 3 years. At the time, I hosted my sites on under-powered hardware that had little memory and had trouble keeping up with demand when I used Apache, but was able to keep this web site up and running the day one of my posts hit the front page of Digg (back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Digg was a really cool website). Back then, NGINX was still pretty new and most of the…

Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!

Functional programming is not new, but it is becoming popular once again. For this reason, in my last book review, I talked about a Lisp book and this review will cover a book on Erlang. Functional programming treats computation differently from other programming languages. Here, computation is done by evaluating mathematical functions. State and mutable data are avoided. Most of this is rooted in lambda calculus, in which everything is a function (yes, I’m simplifying, but this is a short review). Even if you prefer to use a different programming style, learning a functional language is beneficial to expand your…