Reviewers of The Eye of the World often cited Jordan as being a modern Tolkien. Jordan was hailed as having created a complex and realistic world that, for once, also contained strong women characters.

I am not as impressed. The first volume begins in a small village and follows several characters as they make their way to the Big City while they battle evil in a world suffused with magic. The women are certainly strong-willed and powerful, which is a great improvement over Tolkien, but the central character is a dim-witted, untutored, uncultured, unsophisticated young male. The magic is haphazard and often illogical; two of the characters are so powerful that the author never generates any doubt in the reader’s mind that they will prevail.

The Eye of the World suffers when contrasted with George R. R. Martin’s 1996 book A Game of Thrones, the first volume of his A Song of Ice and Fire series (also incomplete). Martin’s book contains richly drawn characters and a complex story that dwarf Jordan’s effort. I am currently reading the second volume of Martin’s series, but I don’t plan to read any more volumes of The Wheel of Time.

Nicholas Whyte recently posted that an eight-hour version of the Foundation Trilogy, produced by the BBC in 1973, is available at the Internet Archive Community Audio website. I immediately downloaded the eight one-hour MP3 files and began listening to them. This BBC version is performed as a radio play with little or no connecting narration. If you are not completely familiar with the books, this version can be a little confusing. But since I have read this science fiction classic possibly thirty times, I’ve had no problem following the story.

I once owned a six-cassette set of abridged readings of the Foundation Trilogy; I probably listened to it more than twenty times, to the point that I can recite long stretches of the book from memory. This edition was distinctive because it was Isaac Asimov himself who read Foundation on the first two cassettes. Asimov wasn’t an especially good reader compared to David Dukes, who read the second and third novels in this edition. But it was from Asimov’s reading that I learned that Hari Seldon’s first name is pronounced Harry and Gaal Dornick’s first name is pronounced Gale.

I searched for information about the cassette edition and found it on Edward Seiler’s Isaac Asimov Home Page, a comprehensive listing of everything Asimov produced in his lifetime. Seiler’s Asimov on Other Media page lists audio recordings, by Asimov and others, of Asimov’s works, and it was there that I found the following information:

• Foundation (abridged), read by Isaac Asimov. Bantam Audio, New York, 1988, 2 cassettes, 180 min. ISBN 0-553-45114-6.
• Foundation and Empire (abridged), read by David Dukes. Bantam Audio, New York, 1991, 2 cassettes, 180 min. ISBN 0-553-45261-4.
• Second Foundation (abridged), read by David Dukes.Bantam Audio, New York, 1991, 2 cassettes, 180 min. ISBN 0-553-47015-9.

If you’re interested, you can find copies of these editions from used book sellers on the Internet.

audible.com has a very good set of unabridged readings of the Foundation Trilogy by Scott Brick: Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation, all three of which I have listened to twice.

More Than Human, which was published in 1953, is a novel in three somewhat disconnect parts. The first part, “The Fabulous Idiot,” narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, begins with the story of a man, Lone, who has little intelligence but has telepathic power. Lone gradually connects with four others, Janie, Bonnie, Beanie, and Baby, each of whom is incomplete as a human being but each of whom possesses an unusual, inhuman power (Janie, telekenesis; Bonnie and Beanie (twins), teleportation; and Baby, superhuman intelligence). These five persons form a gestalt (a whole greater than its parts), which shows signs of becoming, as a group, more than human in its capabilities.

The second part, “Baby Is Three,” is narrated by Harlan Ellison. It is told in the first person by Gerry, who has replaced Lone as a member of the gestalt. Gerry is the new leader of the gestalt, but he lacks morality.

The third and final part, “Morality,” is narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. It tells how the gestalt acquires its sixth and final member, Hip, who serves as its conscience and provides morality to the gestalt’s actions.

The only element of science fiction in the novel is the invention of an anti-gravity machine by the gestalt, and this is what connects the first part of the story to the third part in a droll way.

On the whole, this is an unusual and especially interesting novel, and I recommend the audiobook highly. I read a lot of science fiction as a teenager, but I somehow missed Theodore Sturgeon in favor of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Now I view Sturgeon as the best writer of this group of four.

Rating: ★★★★★

The premise of Drood is that it represents a memoir of Wilkie Collins that is withheld from publication until 125 years after Collins’s death.  (Since Collins died in 1889, the publication date for this memoir would be 2014, still in our future.) Although Collins was twelve years younger than Dickens, the two authors were close friends who collaborated on many projects. Collins is best known today for two novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, the latter frequently cited as the first detective novel written in English and Collins’s masterpiece.

Drood is an impressive feat of scholarship on Simmons’s part. Clearly he did a great deal of research (attested by two and a half pages of notes and references in the acknowledgments), and this shows in the amount of detail he provides concerning the lives of both Collins and Dickens. The book begins with a recapitulation of the Staplehurst accident, a train wreck that killed many people but spared Charles Dickens, his secret mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother, all of whom were riding in a first class carriage. After helping Ellen and Mrs. Ternan escape the wreckage and assisting with caring for other injured passengers, Dickens returned to the train carriage to retrieve the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend (my favorite of Dickens’s novels).

It is while aiding other injured passengers that Dickens encounters Drood, a vampire-like, cadaverous figure with a head like a naked skull, dark vertical slits in place of a nose, and widely spaced, pointed teeth. It is Dickens’s impression that Drood’s aid to the injured and dying is to hasten their deaths, but Drood soon disappears from the scene. The plot of the book is driven by the search for Drood in the darkest neighborhoods of London by Dickens, Collins, and London police and private detectives.

The book is rewarding, but the reader must be patient because the book is long (771 pages). The first chapter is splendidly thrilling, but things quickly slow down thereafter as the fictional Wilkie Collins tells more than many readers really want to know about his and Dickens’s lives, collaborations, and secrets. Collins, who is addicted to laudanum (a tincture of opium), relates a tale that becomes increasing fantastical and doubtful, and the reader begins to wonder what is true and what is the result of the hallucinations of an opium addict.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Mark Pilgrim, who works for Google, responded unsympathetically in a post titled “The ‘Book’ Is Dead,” contending that Google does not encourage piracy merely by providing links to pirated material, although he ends with

The “book” is dead. Long live “content.” And God help us all if world-class writers like David can’t make a living from it.

There are many, many interesting comments to both posts; some are the usual outrageous trolls, but others are thought-provoking and worth reading. Dan Liu makes the best comment: Books contain and communicate ideas that cannot be found with a quick search of the Internet.

I buy a lot of technical books (currently I’m on a binge buying books about Python). I read the books cover to cover and add notes and annotation in red ink so my notes are easy to find. During this process, I often make additions to the index.

I also have a subscription to Safari Books Online ($23 per month), and this has more than paid for itself many times over. Sometimes I want to read only a chapter or two of a book, in which case it isn’t worth buying the entire book. In other cases, I decide that a book is not useful, in which case I save money by not buying a book I won’t use.

I thought that I would quit buying books, since my Safari Books Online subscription allows me to download and print five chapters each month for no extra charge (the terms are that I am not allowed to distribute the PDFs to other people). But the reality is that when I find a really good book, I buy the printed copy, mark it up, and put it on the shelf next to where I work. It’s easier to reach over for a real book to get a quick answer.

So, what’s the secret? Ms. Bouton writes (and quotes):

The key traits [for long life] are prudence and persistence. “The findings clearly revealed that the best childhood personality predictor of longevity was conscientiousness,” they write, “the qualities of a prudent, persistent, well-organized person, like a scientist-professor — somewhat obsessive and not at all carefree.”

According to Ms. Bouton, the authors of the book find that the genetic component to long life explains only about one-third of long-life factors. The other two-thirds are the results of lifestyles and chance. Ms. Bouton then explores three possible explanations for how conscientiousness might promote long life. She finishes up by exploring other personality traits that might be related to living a long time.

The article is well worth reading, and I have put the book on my list of must-reads.

At first, the novel appears to be about a teenage movie actress, Rosemary Hoyt, who is vacationing on the French Riviera with her mother. Rosemary meets a crowd of wealthy and idle socialites, including Dick Diver and his wife, Nicole.

The story presently focuses on Dick Diver, who is a gifted and intelligent American physician and psychoanalyst who has married Nicole after treating her for mental illness. Nicole comes from a wealthy family, and it is her money that supports Dick’s medical career in Europe. However, as time passes, Nicole’s mental problems persist, and Dick, growing increasingly unhappy in his marriage and career, turns to alcohol, behaves unprofessionally, and becomes the weaker of the two partners in the relationship.

Wikipedia provides useful information on the genesis of this novel and the events in Fitzgerald’s life on which it was based. There are many other commercially-oriented reviews and summaries aimed at high school and college students.

Trevor White does an good job reading this book. He is able to perform a variety of British accents, and he can also narrate French and Italian rapidly and fluently.

Rating: ★★★★☆

It is quite an achievement to have systematically read and reviewed all the Hugo award-winning novels. Nicholas Whyte’s post provides a quick list of the novels—I could find no such summary list at the Hugo Awards site itself—and a link to his review of each novel.

Whyte did not enjoy Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky as much as I did. I think both novels are masterpieces of science fiction. Vinge is without peer in his world-building skills, and his characters and plots are highly engaging.

On the other hand, I have not been able to finish any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s books. Three of her books were awarded Hugos, Barrayar (1992), Mirror Dance (1995), and Paladin of Souls (2004), and a few others have been nominated.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, was a strange choice for the Hugo in 2005; and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was an equally strange choice in 2001. I do not consider magic to be science fiction.

Complaint Department

Complaint #1: The website for the Hugo Awards is badly designed, making it difficult for a passerby to learn what the awards are and who the winners have been. My difficulties with the site reminded me of xkcd’s Venn diagram of how the information provided by university websites overlaps very little with the information you’re seeking. The Hugo Awards site is organized the same way.

Complaint #2: Whyte’s livejournal.com blog has a limitation for those who want to comment, a limitation I’ve never seen on other blogging platforms. In the From box, my choices are limited to Anonymous, LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, Mail.Ru, and Vkontakte. There is no way to enter my standard blogging identity using my email address and URL. If LiveJournal doesn’t want to know who I am, then I’m not going to leave a comment.

Complaint #3: I had difficulties connecting to the livejournal.com website and to Nicholas Whyte’s pages on the site while composing this post. Why do they call it live journal, when it’s often lifeless?

The highly inventive, brilliant author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and Anathem returns returns with his most accessible novel to date, a high-stakes thriller in which a wealthy tech entrepreneur gets caught in the very real crossfire of his own online fantasy war game.

The expanded plot summary provided by the publisher is:

Four decades ago, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa family, fled to a wild and lonely mountainous corner of British Columbia to avoid the draft. Smuggling backpack loads of high-grade marijuana across the border into Northern Idaho, he quickly amassed an enormous and illegal fortune. With plenty of time and money to burn, he became addicted to an online fantasy game in which opposing factions battle for power and treasure in a vast cyber realm. Like many serious gamers, he began routinely purchasing viral gold pieces and other desirables from Chinese gold farmers—young professional players in Asia who accumulated virtual weapons and armor to sell to busy American and European buyers.

For Richard, the game was the perfect opportunity to launder his aging hundred dollar bills and begin his own high-tech start up—a venture that has morphed into a Fortune 500 computer gaming group, Corporation 9592, with its own super successful online role-playing game, T’Rain. But the line between fantasy and reality becomes dangerously blurred when a young gold farmer accidently triggers a virtual war for dominance—and Richard is caught at the center.

In this edgy, 21st century tale, Neal Stephenson, one of the most ambitious and prophetic writers of our time, returns to the terrain of his cyberpunk masterpieces Snow Crash and Crpytonomicon, leading readers through the looking glass and into the dark heart of imagination.

How is it that of all of Neal Stephenson’s novels, only The Diamond Age has been awarded a Hugo? I greatly enjoyed reading Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon (Stephenson’s masterpiece), all three volumes of The Baroque Cycle, and Anathem; all of these are as good as or better than any recent Hugo Award-winner.

I look forward to reading Reamde the day it comes out.

I read the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones, six months ago, and it is one of the best fantasy books I’ve read. I am deliberately biding my time before starting the second book, A Clash of Kings, because Martin’s fans have been waiting for the fifth book in the series since 2005. I feel no hurry to catch up since it could be many years, if ever, before Martin finishes the series.

Laura Miller’s article details the history of the series and praises Martin for making an effort to meet and interact with his readers. But then she writes that Martin’s inability to finish the fifth book is making his fans increasingly impatient, even irate. Many fans have complained on Martin’s blog and on other sites devoted to his books.

The online attacks on Martin suggest that some readers have a new idea about what an author owes them. They see themselves as customers, not devotees, and they expect prompt, consistent service.

This is an interesting idea. But writing is art, which requires inspiration and dedication, especially to write as well as Martin does. We’ve all started projects we’ve never finished, and it’s possible, even likely, that Martin won’t finish his series. In that event, we’ll have to solace ourselves with rereading the first books in the series and speculate on what might have been.

The story begins with the theft of treasure from an MMORPG (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game) and expands to a realization that the cryptographic keys for the backbone of the European computer networks have been stolen. Stross’s novel has a satisfying number of plot twists, all of which make sense.

Charles Stross is a master at world-building. In Halting State, Stross envisions a future that will be dominated by the European Union, China, and India:

[Diplomacy is] all about enforcing economic hegemony, which is maintained by broadcasting your vision of how the global trade system should be structured. And what we’re facing is a real headache—a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon.

‘We,’ for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in—call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People’s Republic of China, and India. America isn’t in play—they’ve only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we finish setting up the convergence criteria for Russian accession to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date, and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. Plus, they’ve got all those rusty aircraft carriers to keep afloat….

But today, our infrastructure—Europe’s—is in better shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-industrial relatively recently, so their network infrastructure is almost as new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So there’s this constant jockeying for position between three hyperpowers while the USA takes time out….

This is an interesting point of view that rings true in some ways. The United States is in decline as our infrastructure crumbles, and the money we need to rebuild is being spent on wasteful wars. If the Republicans succeed with their short-sighted agenda, we will continue to fully fund our military while further cutting funds for other needs, exacerbating our death spiral.

However, one thing that Stross doesn’t take into account in his view of the future is the rampant corruption in the governments of China and India. In the long term, I believe corruption will retard economic growth in these countries by siphoning away money that would otherwise be reinvested in growth. China and India also have the problem of supporting huge agrarian populations, whereas in the European Union and in the United States, a tiny minority of the population raises food.

Rule 34, a sequel to Halting State, will be released in the United States on July 5, 2011.

Rating: ★★★★☆

If I do write that novel, and if it receives a review with negative comments, I’ll try not to respond the way Jacqueline Howett did in the comments to a review by BigAl’s Books and Pals. (In the middle of the comments battle, BigAl followed up with “A Word on Negative Reviews.”)

Even an excellent and famous writer like Alice Hoffman can behave badly in response to a poor review.

Jacqueline Howett should invest some time reading BigAl’s response and Emily St. John Mandel’s essay, “On Bad Reviews,” on The Millions web site.

[Updated 31-Mar-2011]

BigAl posted today about his experience with the Howett review.

As most of you who are now following this blog can probably imagine it has been a crazy couple of days. Just when I think it is going to calm down something happens that keeps it going. I understand “going viral” from an entirely new perspective now.

BigAl reports two immediate benefits: A huge increase in traffic to his site, and over one hundred people volunteering to write book reviews.

BigAl also comments about the ugly side of the controversy.

One thing that rankles me is those posting 1 star reviews on Amazon, having not read the book at all. Those who read the sample and posted I have mixed feelings about. They at least had some basis for their comments. The technical issues I pointed out are apparent early on. Those who posted without reading at all are – I’d better not use any of the terms I really want. Unethical, rude, and inhumane are some more polite ways to put it. For the record I feel the same about 5 star reviews from friends and family who haven’t read the book or 1 star reviews based on price. I’m happy Amazon has weeded out most of the bogus reviews from Ms. Howett’s book.

The first edition has been an old friend that has provided me with weeks of interesting reading and study. The new edition is fatter; at first glance, much of the material has not changed, but I think I’ll just have to read it cover to cover like as did with the first edition to find what’s new and review what’s repeated from the first edition.

This book is clear but challenging; most of the linear algebra is beyond my skills, but I know that if I just worked hard enough at it, I could figure it out. One of the best features of this book is the use of color on every page. I also like how the authors return to some problems using different analytical methods to see how they give slightly different answers.

This book is disappointingly poor. Bova’s story deliberately and annoyingly departs from the excitement of exploring Mars to a tedious and distasteful exploration of the interactions among back-stabbing scientists, ambitious reporters, an incompetent physician, manipulative administrators, and egotistical politicians. All characters are trapped in a Cold War world where nationalism is paramount. The story is also pervaded by insensitive and offensive anti-Indian racism.

Bova showed no foresight in predicting improvements in digital technology. The scientists use film cameras, listen to music on tape, and exchange files on floppies.

The crises in the storyline—and there are many—are forced, uninteresting, and unconvincing. None of the characters are particularly likeable or convincingly human.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars are much better books about the exploration of Mars. I recommend that you avoid this one.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

There is a work-around, the search utility in the Kindle app. If I search the book for the term “archaea,” I find that the word occurs at three positions in the book (one position being the index entry). However, for the index entry “Cities, adjacent possible in,” I haven’t found a search that narrows the results down to what would be referenced by the index entry.

According to a review of book apps by Jeremy Horowitz at ilounge.com, the iBooks app has the same problem. I have not yet purchased any books through the iBooks app, so I can’t speak from experience.

This is disappointing. It should not be difficult to provide an index that functions in an electronic book.

I read the first book in the series, A Game of Thrones, and it is an outstanding book. I’ve been waiting for the right moment to start the second book, A Clash of Kings, because I know I’ll need three or four uninterrupted days to read it from front cover to back cover. Perhaps now is the time.

Lehrer is the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, which I have begun listening to through my audible.com subscription, and How We Decide, which I’ve seen in book stores but haven’t picked up yet. Lehrer has also written a number of science-oriented articles, which I need to follow up on.

Watch this space for a review of Proust Was a Neuroscientist when I finish the book.

However, if I search the iTunes app store today for “Safari to go,” nothing comes up. I can’t find any news about this using google searches.

Added later: The Safari Books team pulled their app from the app store for the following reason:

Since we launched the Safari To Go iPad app on November 3rd, we’ve kept a close eye on your reviews and feedback about the app.  While some of you told us the app has useful features, many have also told us that we have work to do before this app delivers the quality experience you have come to expect from Safari Books Online. We hear you loud and clear, and are removing the Safari To Go iPad app from the App Store until we can deliver an updated, improved app. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

[Updated 11-May-2011]

The new “Safari to Go” iPad app is now available.

According to the epilogue, Norwegian Wood made Haruki Murakami so famous that he had to flee Japan for a time to avoid what he considered excessive adulation. This is a novel that appeals to college students since it dwells on things about which college students obsess: Love, suicide, drinking, sex, mental health, music, and the inconsistent and often hypocritical behavior of their fellow students. Furthermore, the central protagonist is an ordinary though decent and caring young man whose life is much more interesting than the average college student’s life.

Unfortunately, James Yaegashi’s narration almost spoiled the book for me. He is careful to correctly pronounce all Japanese names, which is a big plus. But he reads too slowly, with many long pauses between sentences, and much of the reading is flat and expressionless. I had to listen at 2x speed to sustain my ability to follow the story. I think Yaegashi’s voice was perfect for the central character, Toru, but he failed to create plausible voices for the female characters, using a creaky voice that made the women sound elderly.

I have always loved words and their origins. I can spend hours browsing the dictionary, moving from word to word as my whims and serendipity take me. Search and navigation are simple. It is easy to search for words, including searches using the “*” wild card character, which makes it easy to find words ending with certain characters (something that is impossible to do with a regular dictionary).

This app costs $30 on the iTunes Store. The download is more than 300 MB. The app is improved on a regular basis, and I don’t remember it ever crashing (unlike so many other iOS apps). I use it daily.

When it’s time for me to buy Johanna a gift, I’m uncertain what new book I should buy her. So I spend a lot of time in the mystery section at the local book stores trying to find something I think she’ll like. My current method is to read the first few chapters of a book I’m considering to see if the plot and style have the flavor she prefers.

So I’m admitting right here that I bought Johanna The Last Detective, written by Peter Lovesey. And I’m admitting right here that the four chapters I read in the book store got me hooked on the story. And finally I’m admitting right here that I finished reading the entire book today, before I’ve given it to her.

I’m not going to discuss details of the plot, because anything I say could spoil it for other readers. In many ways, the book is written in the style of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, but it has modern touches, including two long sections written in the first person as told by two of the suspects. The novel has several delightful and novel twists, and the last three chapters contain satisfying surprises.

I recommend this book, and I’m pretty sure Johanna will enjoy it, too.

Clarke clearly did a lot of research before writing this novel, and his writing is intelligent and well-organized. As usual with Clarke’s novels, the emphasis is on technology, not people, and the characters are cardboard cutouts with no real personalities.

Much of the novel is out of date. We know now that there are not seas of dust on the Moon. Sexism is overt, and the purpose of women in the book is seemingly only to serve men. All scientists and engineers in the book are men. This reflects the cultural attitudes of the early 1960s (as reflected in the “Mad Men” television series).

As another reviewer commented, Clarke completely missed the development of computers and other electronic devices. I was amused by one scene in which the passengers of the stranded vessel gather together their reading materials, which include a couple of paperback novels and a newspaper. No one is carrying a Kindle-like or iPod-like device for reading or listening to books.

Despite these flaws, the story is still entertaining as Clarke moves logically through the consequences of the sinking of a boat-like vessel under several meters of dust and the difficulties of finding the vessel and rescuing the passengers.

I subscribe to audible.com on the two books per month plan. I sometimes buy extra books when audible.com offers discounts. I listen to more books in a year than I read because I listen while doing other things (dishes, yard work, walking, etc.).

In 2010, I completed the following 32 books:

Singularity Sky, by Charles Stross ☆☆☆☆

The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo ☆☆☆☆☆

The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson ☆☆☆☆

Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope ☆☆☆☆☆

Liberty, by Garrison Keillor ☆☆☆☆

Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler ☆☆☆

The End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov ☆☆☆

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson ☆☆☆☆

Iron Sunrise, by Charles Stross ☆☆☆☆

Earth Abides, by George R. Steward ☆☆☆☆☆

Little Fuzzy, by H. Beam Piper ☆☆☆☆

Desolation Island, by Patrick O’Brian ☆☆☆☆☆

The Journey of Crazy Horse, by Joseph M. Marshall III ☆☆☆

Mistress of Magic, by Marion Zimmer Bradley ☆☆☆

The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant ☆☆☆

Foundation, by Isaac Asimov ☆☆☆☆

Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov ☆☆☆☆

Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov ☆☆☆☆

Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes ☆☆☆☆☆

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen ☆☆☆☆☆

Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle ☆☆

Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke ☆☆☆

The Creature from Beyond Infinity, by Henry Kuttner ☆☆

The City and the Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke ☆☆☆☆

The Dreaming Jewels, by Theodore Sturgeon ☆☆☆☆

The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, by Ian Mortimer ☆☆☆☆

Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach ☆☆☆☆

Bonk, by Mary Roach ☆☆☆☆

Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain ☆☆☆☆

1491, by Charles C. Mann ☆☆☆☆☆

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid ☆☆☆☆☆

The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians, by John Bagnell Bury ☆☆☆☆

As published in the novel, the Perl script is gibberish, impossible to read and understand. Fortunately, the “verbose version” of the script is available on Bruce Schneier’s web site at www.schneier.com/code/sol.pl. Bruce Schneier provides an explanation of the Solitaire Encryption System at www.schneier.com/solitaire.html. And Neal Stephenson himself discusses the novel and the Perl script at web.mac.com/nealstephenson/Neal_Stephensons_Site/cypherFAQ.html.

Cryptonomicon is a brilliant novel, and it reminds me in many ways of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, one of my favorite books. It is a book I know I’ll have to read more than once, because I’m certain I’m missing important clues and subtexts in the story that will become apparent only on a rereading.

I purchased this book in 2005 when I was doing some consulting for a microarray company in Massachusetts, where I was adapting the BioArray Software Environment (BASE 1.2), which was written in PHP, to their process. I had set the book aside until recently, when I was motivated to review PHP so I could modify the WordPress theme that I use for this blog.

PHP is the programming language usually referred to by the P in the acronym LAMP, which stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP. PHP was designed from the beginning to work closely with the Apache httpd web server and with the MySQL database management system. PHP code is easily embedded into HTML, and this makes it easy for relative novices to use a three-tier architecture for their web sites.

I found Web Database Applications with PHP and MySQL an excellent introduction to PHP and MySQL for someone who is skilled at programming using another language. The introductory material on PHP was just enough to get me started, and I quickly learned to refer to the PHP documentation (which is also excellent) when I needed enlightenment. The book also provides several chapters that provide a solid introduction to MySQL 4.1.

The last five chapters of the book are devoted to a complete working example of an online wine store. All source code is available at the authors’ web site, http://www.webdatabasebook.com/. This is an invaluable resource that can serve as the basis for many other PHP projects.

In my opinion, this book is not appropriate for someone who is learning to program or use databases for the first time. Good alternatives might be Learning PHP & MySQL, 2nd Edition, by Michele E. Davis and Jon A. Phillips (published August, 2007, by O’Reilly), and Learning SQL, by Alan Beaulieu (published August, 2005, by O’Reilly). (I read Learning SQL recently, and I recommend it highly. Watch for a review at a later date.)

Since the book was published nearly four years ago, some of the material is dated. In 2004, PHP 5.0 was still in beta; PHP has reached 5.2 by now, and support for PHP 4 is about to end. Similarly, the book recommends using MySQL 4.0 or 4.1, whereas today MySQL 5.0 is very stable. The book provides an excellent set of appendices that explain how to install and configure Apache httpd, MySQL, and PHP for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Again, these instructions are now dated, but they should still provide a useful guide.

I found the index somewhat frustrating to use; some items I was interested in are not found there. These include:

• @, the error control operator
• & and =&, operators used for working with references to variables
• reference, the term referring to a variable that is not passed by value
• define, the function used to create constants
• magic constants, such as __FILE__, __LINE__, __FUNCTION__, __CLASS__, and __METHOD__

I don’t use PHP in my daily work; rather, I use Perl. (Python is the next language I plan to learn, but that’s another story.) I like how PHP has combined arrays and hashes into a single array type. I like PHP’s Boolean values, true and false. And I like how easy it is to embed PHP into HTML; it makes creating a web page dynamically more intuitive than Perl CGI does. But I dislike the inconsistent and ugly naming of many standard functions (for example, strtoupper, the PHP equivalent of Perl’s uc), and this seems to be a common complaint about PHP. I also don’t like the large number of global variables and constants that PHP uses.

There is a BioPHP project (PHP for Bioinformatics), at http://biophp.org/, but it is not as well developed as the BioPerl or BioPython projects. The only large bioinformatics project that I’m aware of that uses PHP is the BioArray Software Environment (BASE) 1.2. Version 2.0 of BASE has been completely rewritten in Java.

Part comedy of manners, part chick lit in male drag, James Collins’s “Beginner’s Greek” is a great big sunny lemon chiffon pie of a novel, set, for good measure and our sociological titillation, among the WASP ruling classes, people who work at white-shoe investment firms and own villas in southwestern France and can instantly tell the difference between fine Bordeaux and plonk.

I had missed the review, but tonight I listened to the New York Times Book Review Podcast, in which Sam Tanenhaus interviews James Collins. Mr. Collins turns out to be an experienced journalist who decided finally that he had a story to tell in Beginner’s Greek, his first novel.

One of the amusing parts of the interview comes when Mr. Tanenhaus asks Mr. Collins if he is happy living in Virginia. It sounds to me like Mr. Collins (although he doesn’t say so) would much rather be back in New York, but his wife prefers Virginia. Mr. Collins admits, however, that living in Virginia made it easier to write Beginner’s Greek.

This book is going on my wish list.