Arrow's Fall

I'm now in the middle of the book, and I had to stop and do something else. Talia is the hero of these books, and the author built her character over the three books well enough that I care for her. Currently she was caught by evil, raped, tortured and committed suicide. There is a strange prophecy from the second book that says something about it, but it's no help now.

It hurts to see a loved one hurt, even she is fictional character.

Arrow's Flight

This is the second book in the Arrows trilogy, and it's a good one, but I don't recommend to read it as a stand alone book. It's mostly about the growth of a single character, and it builds some big expectations for Arrow's Fall, the next book. The story is good, flowing smoothly, and very touching. We see Talia, the main character as she is thrown into her intership duties and how she grows to handle them. It's certainly wouldn't be a stand alone book, unlike Arrows of the Queen, but there is quite of bit of information there that was interesting to learn. Rolan, Talia's Companion, is still not talking to her... I hope he would start talking sometime soon, it's annoying to read a Valdemar novel where the Companion isn't that much above an ucommon animal. In other Valdemar novels, the Companion is a character in its own right, here it's more like... a witch's familiar.

I just finished reading Domain Driven Design, it took me over a month and a half to finish that. The last time that I read a book for that amount of time, I was learning English and reading with a dictionary by my side.

Some parts of it were very interesting, and I could certainly see how I would apply it in certain situations. Other parts, however (mostly toward the end, about large systems) I'd to force myself to read. This is probably because I've no real experience in building the typical business applications.

It'd gotten a really good review from many people, and I'm certainly going to apply those techniques where appropriate. It's several concepts there that are quite interesting, and I gathered several more books that I want to read because of it (mostly Fowler's :-) ).

The second book of the Exile's seria, it talks about the events after the Tedral Wars and the events of the Court of Valdemar.

I just finished reading this book, and it has everything one would want from such a book. The action is very well paced, and there is quite a bit of emotional involment of the reader (me, that is :-D) in the story. Like all good fantasy books, it has a consistent world and you get the feeling that there is a whole lot more than what is shown to you there. There is a world, and a rich one, behind the story.

The previous book,  

Exile's Honor was a very good action-packed book, this one add intrigue and feeling to the story. I felt sorry for the characters, laughed and was touched by the story. This isn't the first time that I recommend Mercedes Lackey, who is truly a gifted writer. I've quite a few books that I'm set to read the moment that they come out from this author.

All in all, a very good and entertaining read.

"Some programming languages manage to absorb change but withstand progress." -- Tech Support Slogan
"I am learning that criticism is not nearly as effective as sabotage." -- Unknown
"Managing programmers is like herding cats." -- Tech Support Slogan
"Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes." -- Tech Support Slogan

Alta is the second of book by Mercedes Lackey, following Joust. It's a fantasy novel about dragons, and intrigue, and friendships, and some more dragons.

I read it in one seating (432 pages), and immnesly enjoyed it, just as I enjoyed Joust.

Highly recommended.

I bought this book because I was certain that it was dilbert-in-a-book. The book is supposed to be about an ERP implementation in a company, and the start was really promsing.

The problem is with the rest of the book, which then digress to the characters acting in totally unbelievable ways (whatever-it-takes-to-please-the-client, for example) and the book stops being fun.

The worst part of it that the book is trying to sell you the author's point of view regarding the way we should develop software. I'm not saying that it would be a good way to do so, but somehow I felt like reading some of  Karl Marx's works.

All in all, I didn't like it very much.

The book is directed at Java developers interested in learning Hibernate, but considerring the similarities between Hibernate and NHibernate, it just as useful for .Net developers who wants to learn how to use NHibernate.

The concepts transfer very easily from one framework to the other, and I've only found two places where NHibernate differed from Hibernate (and one of them got fixed since then :-D)

The book starts with a general view on O/R mappers and the advantages of using them, then moves on to the history of Hibernate (which wasn't quite of interest to me). Then it gets to the fun stuff, starting from a simple exmaple, the books shows you the basics of mapping classes to database, working with persistant objects, transaction, concurrency and caching.

After that, you get advance mapping concets and a discussion about efficency which I found quite useful.

The most interesting part of the book, and the most disappointing for me, was the chapter that talked about how to write applications. Most of Java application are targeted for the web, so the discussion centered around patterns for the web. And far less on local applications. Personally, I develop WinForms applications, and rarely ASP.Net applications, other people experiance vary, of course.

Over all, a really good book.

This book is good.

The author covers such things as IBM & the PC, Netscape vs. Microsoft, WordStart vs itself, and a lot more.

Above all, this book is funny, very funny.
I wasn't very much interested in software during the eighties, mainly due to the fact that I was eagerly unticipating my age moving into the two digit zone, but this book manage to capture the old mistakes and bring them to life.
I read it in three days {work got in the day, then the book got in the way of work :D} and it is awesome read.

The author's use of lanuague is superb, and manage to make me chuckle quite a bit.
The ancedotes include ancient history {a text co-proccessor?} to the dot com bomb. Some of them I can relate to personally.

Two things I didn't like:

• "brainchild" - The first time ever I encountered this word, and the author uses it constantly, and it sort of jump out of the page at me everytime. Doesn't help the the Hebrew translation, literaly translated back, is: "Fruit of his Mind", which is just as rare.
• The author include many instances where he made a projection that turned out to be correct - I couldn't find any instance where he admit to be wrong. I don't buy this, and it feel too much like ego-boosting.

Nevertheless, it's a facinating book. You can read it as a history book, a marketing advice, humor book or as a general information source.

Highly recommended.