Cher's Book Reviews
The Book Rating System
Every rating system is only as good as its explanation. If you don't know how I work out my ratings, they're not really good enough for you to make up your own mind. You shouldn't buy a book just because I rated it good. But it might be a good idea to buy and read a book if I rated it good and you agree with my argument why I rated it good. Some parts of that argument are clear from the text. Other parts are applicable to all books, and they're described here.
The two most important parts of my rating are:
- The overall impression the book gave me.
- How good the book matched its profile and its title.
More detailed parts of my ratings are:
- Style of writing (simple yet scientific and a bit sarcastic).
- Correctness - I hate books that are full of typos.
- Completeness - a book shouldn't leave out topics you'd expect from its title or cover description.
- Actuality - a book should either be timeless or up-to-date in respect of the time of its writing.
- Accuracy - a book should be clear, accurate and precise, e.g. if it states that foo is faster than bar, it should give numbers.
- Scientific - if a book gives facts, the facts should be comprehensible and reproducible. If it gives numbers, the numbers have to be explained by explaining the experiment and the circumstances.
The Rated Books
- The Art of UNIX Programming
Rating: 6 out of 7. The standard book about all meta-topics around software development in general, not only applicable to UNIX. Covers project organization (directory structure, essential files), community communication, important requirements, domain specific languages and more. A MUST have for all programmers, not only UNIX programmers.
- A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates
Rating: 6 out of 7. If there is one single book that a true geek's bookshelf must not be missing, then it's this one. I've only recently heard of this book, and actually this book was the book that made me starting to write book reviews.
The books sole content is a table of one million random numbers of high quality plus a table of a hundret thousand normal deviates.
- AI for Game Developers
Rating: 4 out of 7. An interesting book about artificial intelligence for game developers describing algorithms for weak AI. Interesting, but don't expect too much from it. (Not yet finnished)
