Back in Singapore

I am back in Singapore for a vacation but recovering from jet lag. I flew United back which has terrible in-flight entertainment (but at a price that can't be beat!), so I finished all the books I bought (and then some!). Here are quick reviews for some of them.

"The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing" provides an excellent concise overview of financial definitions and tools. Kelly also provides introductions to trading strategies tied to investors such as Graham, Buffett, Lynch, O'Neil, etc. The writing style is conversational and easy to follow. However, it serves as a purely introductory text to each topic, and the reader is constantly advised to pick up the relevant book for more details. This is not necessarily a bad thing - just don't expect this to be the only stock-trading book you should be reading.

"Clean Code" talks about fundamental software engineering practices that one might pick up when working collaboratively over a long period of time. It covers programming style, refactoring and patterns. The coverage is fairly basic but it is light reading, so a seasoned software engineer can cover it in less than a day, while more novice individuals can read this over a few days to allow the ideas to sink in. The style suggestions given in this book (useful comments, meaningful names for functions and variables, etc) are all standard advice, but the examples given in this book illustrate the usefulness of following these basic guidelines. The examples are all in Java, but it should be easy to extrapolate them into general principles for any language.

Google has style guides for every language we use in projects, and this book is not as useful to me, since I am better off following the style that everyone else is following. However, if you work in a company with no style guide for the programming language you are using, you cannot go wrong applying the principles advocated by this book, and then enforcing this style onto everyone else who works in the same project.

"The Productive Programmer" covers an interesting aspect of programming - the tools and tricks that seasoned software engineers use to understand and test their programs. It covers code coverage tools, debugging tools, code analysis tools and text editing tips. I can see how useful if you work in an environment where the tools you use are not standardized or set up for you. Again, at Google, there is already a lot of foundation work done to prepare software engineers with tools that others have found useful, together with documentation or courses to enrich software engineers on how to utilize these tools.

I am not sure if this is praise for Google, or for the book. :)

Comments

[wincent]

Hey great writeup on singapore forms of entertainment. I visited singapore before and I must say that http://www.visitors.sg/singapore-tourist-attractions.asp" REL="nofollow"> singapore tourist attractions are quite a handful. Definitely a place to visit for a holiday.