Happy New Year

It seems like only yesterday that we were looking forward to the year 2000 and the problems and opportunities that the new millennium would begin, and here we are seeing out the last year of this millenniums inaugural decade. Time truly does fly.

Let me be among those to wish you the very best for 2009.

Although I personally thing new year’s resolutions are somewhat tacky, I’m making a few anyway, one of which is to read more – I always make excuses about not having enough time but frankly that’s a rubbish excuse which can be used to justify anything. So my reading list for next month or two comprises:

Fedora 9 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

I’ve kind-of fallen behind the times with the state of Linux, I  used to use it a long time ago, and we’ve got some servers that use it, but they’re pretty much a set and forget exercise. So I’ve bought a book to reacquaint myself, and hopefully to play about with Mono – the .NET implementation on Linux (and others).

The only disappointing thing about this book so far has been my complete failure to get the Fedora 9 DVD included installed on MS VPC 2009, every time I solve one problem another crops up so I’m thinking about ditching Fedora and using CentOS or Ubuntu instead.

Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare

One of my favourite books of all time is a book called Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, and I highly recommend it to anyone that is interested in languages, and especially English, it is incredibly witty and humbling.

This book promises to bring the full strength of Bill Bryson’s wit to bear on Shakespeare and from what I’ve read so far, is going to be incredibly fully and insightful.

My Grammar and I (or should that be ‘Me’)

I’ve not read much of this one so far but what I have read has left me laughing out loud – this book takes a humorous approach to talking about English grammar, both by way of explaining it and exploring it’s many oddities due in part to the imposition of a Latin-inspired grammar on a principally German-derived language.

The Book of Atheist Spirituality

This one is a bit random, I  was in Waterstones (a bookstore) with my brother and our parents when my mother walked over to me with this book as a Joke, but having read the first few pages I decided it was an essential read.

I’m now about 1/2 way through and find the material fascinating, though sometimes the Author does go off on a bit of a rant against Nihilism which, although it may or may not be justified, I find spoils an otherwise relatively objective text.

I’m not a philosopher, nor a theologian, and so I must confess there are certain references he makes to concepts that I’ve had to look up elsewhere, but that aside, I think this is a good read for anyone of any religious perspective.

Mathematics, A Very Short Introduction

This book is fascinating although I can’t work out who it is aimed at. I’m not by any stretch a mathematician but I do enjoy mathematics, so I bought this book expecting a relatively high-level overview of some of the fundamental areas of mathematics – which in all fairness I did get, but some of the reasoning in the book seemed a little low level.

I do think this is a brilliant book for anyone like me who “dabbles” with mathematics once in a while – I learned a great deal, for instance, that the interior angles of a triangle don’t always add up with 180degrees.

One thing it has made me question is the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, because there certainly seem to be a few areas of mathematics that fall into the philosophical domain.

Relativity, A Very Short Introduction

I’ve not started this one yet, but it purports to do for the theory of Relativity what the above did for mathematics, if so, I’m really looking forward to reading it. Sometimes it would be nice to know something a bit more than the famous E = MC^2 equation.

Comments

[Jeff Read]

Happy new year! Hopefully this is the first of many for this year! That's a pretty heavy list of books. You should temper it with a little Azimov or something else fun. Best of luck on your Linux voyage of discovery! Can't say that I am a fan of the Redhat distros but I hope it works for you! :)