Summer Reading
Posted by Skrud at Sunday, April 25th 2004 at 9:32pm
As exam period is nearing its end (my last exam is next Saturday), I’ve begun to start investigating what mental stimulation I’ll be using to keep my mind working this summer… (I need a job too, but that’s another story, and it will probably be boring). So I checked out the Concordia Library and took out a bunch of books that looked interesting.
Two of them are books on the Ruby Programming Language created by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto and is known as a “Pragmatic” Programming Language. So I picked up the definitive Ruby book: Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide (available online in its entirety) and O’Reilly’s Ruby in a Nutshell. I’m intrigued by Ruby because it seems to have a very interesting pure object-oriented premise and some very intuitive syntax and semantics. I suggest you check out the intro to Programming Ruby.
One other thing I want to do this summer is become a hardcore linux hacker, and not just a linux user. So to start off, I picked up Linux Power Tools, which should at the very least familiarize me with some small tips and tricks that I haven’t yet figured out myself. (Although it seems from flipping through it and I can probably skim through most of the book). Therefore, I also picked up O’Reilly’s Understanding the Linux Kernel which is essentially a guided tour through some key parts of the source code. What little bit of actual Systems Programming we did in my recent System Software class was a lot of fun, but I was more than disappointed with the lack of depth offered by that class. We could have learned so much more, and I could have had so much more fun. Why didn’t we even get to write a multi-threaded application for that course? Geez. Therefore I am taking it upon myself to teach myself all the cool things I want to know.
As for the rest of this week, I’ll be studying for my upcoming Discrete Math exam. I don’t expect to do very badly this semester, but I still need to memorize a lot more proofs if I’m going to do well. I’ll just be taking one small break to see the upcoming Iced Earth, Children of Bodom, Evergrey and Eidolon concert. (Even though I’ve seen those bands once, twice, once, and once before, respectively. :P ).
