I'd like to tell you about another Java book that I've found useful. Today, we have Pro Java EE5 Performance Management and Optimization by Steven Haines. It's about ... yes, Java performance: what is it, how do you measure it, how do you improve it, and how do you dig out when it shits on your head. There are a ton of resources on the web and elsewhere on this subject, but what I like about this book is that it brings some formality to the table. "Performance" is such an amorphous term, yet eminently measurable. This book helps you get your arms around the subject and suggests a very specific way to start thinking about managing performance on an ongoing basis.

At FeedBurner, the scalability and efficiency of our core app is obviously very important and has a direct bearing on our equipment purchasing plans. But, to be honest, we haven't been terribly formal about things. Sure, we run our code through a profiler on occasion, and we'll tweak our jvm settings here and there, but for better or for worse, most of our performance tuning has been reactive, usually driven by frequent db query measurement and analysis.

We've started to become a bit more rigorous, though, so the timing of this book is very fortuitous. This book covers the spectrum, from "process" all the way down to suggested JVM garbage collection settings. Chapter 10 ("Java EE Performance Assessment") is especially valuable -- it's a great overview of everything that you should be paying attention to if you have a system that needs to perform.

The writing is fairly good, although there's quite a bit of repetition, and the beginning of each chapter is a little bit Celestine Prophecy, but the author can be forgiven for trying to make things interesting. Also, Mr. Haines works at Quest Software, which produces diagnostic tools like JProbe, but his advice is almost completely tool-agnostic, which I appreciate.

So, a good book to have on hand -- you should really consider getting it if you're responsible for a web-based Java application!

You can read an excerpt here: Solving common Java EE performance problems

This book joins Effective Java and Hibernate in Action as a "two copy" Java book -- it's such a must-have book that I need one copy at home and one copy at the office. This is an incredibly valuable book that is a required read for anyone hoping to create scalable web apps with Java.

Concurrency in Java is a very difficult, iceberg subject, and I guarantee your intution will fail you more often than not. The all-star authors (Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea) manage to make the book as readable as possible. Which is good, because this is not a reference book: it is a book that is meant to be read from cover to cover, multiple times. I found something to be embarassed about every few pages. Swallowing InterruptedExceptions? Oops. Communicating via state between threads via non-volatile variables? Ummm. Using synchronized HashMaps for local caches? Crap. There are a lot of bad habits I've discovered as a result of this book.

This book is also prompting me to move FeedBurner to JDK 1.5 (from JDK 1.4) sooner rather than later. While Doug Lea's concurrency library works well in JDK 1.4, the VM support for atomic variables in JDK 1.5 is reason enough for me. Well, there are a bunch of other reasons of course to move to JDK 1.5, but that's for another post.

Five stars, four thumbs up ... this is a must-read book for all serious Java developers.

By Christian Bauer, Gavin King

I learned a ton from this book, especially about session management. A lot of things I learned went straight into FeedBurner, resulting in some major performance gains. I plan on re-reading this every couple of months or so, and it serves as my number one reference on Hibernate right now.

If you use Hibernate, get this book and read it cover to cover.

Continue reading "Hibernate in Action"

The Warren Buffett Way, Second Edition
by Robert G. Hagstrom

This is the book on my nightstand right now. Mr. Buffett has always been an enigma to me, and so far this book to doing a good job of showing what an honest, straight-forward genius he is. I know I won't be able to evaluate investments the way he does, but I think we can all learn something about character from him.

Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
by H. G. Bissinger

This book was a great way to experience a land I have never visited: West Texas. The author spent a year in Odessa, Texas to examine the town's crazed focus on the high school football program. The picture he paints is not pretty ... quite bleak, actually. My wife really enjoyed this book as well; it's more than a male-oriented sports book, but rather an interesting study on how an environment influences one's values and worldview.

And yes, I'd like to see the movie.

By Bill Bryson


This must have been a very challenging book to write. It's a very broad survey of science from the past 350 years or so, and it's a testament to the talents of Bill Bryson as a writer that he weaves it all together in an engaging, accessible story. Well, maybe not "weave" ... I mean, each chapter examines on particular topic and is fairly independent from the others, but the transitions seem smooth somehow.

When you're dealing with science, the mind can't really appreciate the magnitude of the quantities involved. It's extremely difficult to really relate to how small an electron is, or how brief humans have been on this planet relative to the age of the Earth. Bryson has a special skill in coming up with creative ways to illustrate these quantities that are sometimes head-shakingly unbelievable. My favorite:

Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale … the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, "and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history."

Different chapters will appeal to different people according to their interest in the subjects. I've read quite a few science texts in my days, mostly related to physics, so actually I found some of those chapters a little slow. The most disturbing yet fascinating chapters were those where he discusses all of the possible ways that our species could be wiped out from some enormous global event: from comets striking the Earth to (gulp!) a massive eruption of Yellowstone volcano. Yes, Yellowstone National Park is built on top of one of the largest active volcanoes on the planet. Where do you think those geysers come from?

Make no doubt about it, this is a science book, so if you really don't like science you're probably not going to like this book. But for everyone else, it's a great read that will undoubtedly expand your appreciation for the personalities and achievements of science over the past few centuries.

Continue reading "A Short History of Nearly Everything"

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
By David Allen

I finished my first reading of the book, and I'm going to give the system a try. I'll try not to get all atkins diet about it, but the system just seems to make a lot of sense. It's all about getting stuff out of your head and written down somewhere so you can devote 100% of your brain to the task at hand. I'll probably try to give the book another quick read before doing the cathartic "first processing" where you, essentially, try to identify all of the open loops in your life in one fell swoop.

I've also found some good resources on-line to help implement this system, such as 43 Folders, Tip and Tools from David Allen, and Getting Things Done Zone. I plan on adapting my personal Ecco template to fit GTD as well.

I'll let you know what happens after I take the plunge and have lived with it for a few weeks.

Continue reading "Getting Things Done"

Everything and More
by David Foster Wallace

Reading this book is like being on the receiving end of a long, rambling conversation about mathematics' evolving concept of "infinity". That's not a negative statement, it's just that David Foster Wallace really approaches this subject with his own, inimitable style.

Please note: if you do not, at some level, enjoy mathematics, you will not enjoy this book. It gets pretty deep into the math ... at least as deep as it must in order to give the reader an appreciation for the magnitude of genius that has been applied to this seemingly intractable subject through the ages.

DFW did a great job of keeping me interested through the extensive use of footnotes, diversions, and interpolations. You really do feel like you could sit down and read this book in a single session ... the author barely pauses between thoughts. Most of the book was really setting the table for Cantor's late-1800s work on "infinity", and when you finally get to it, it's really quite breathtaking. Thumbs up.

Continue reading "Everything and More"

The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2)
by Neal Stephenson

"The Confusion" is the second volume in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle trilogy. I found this to be a much more straightforward tale than Quicksilver, but I’m not sure if that was really the case or if I just got over the initial learning curve with the first book. I think there are fewer characters to keep track of, and the intrigues aren’t quite so twisted. And, as a bonus, it took me less than three months to finish it!

Anyway, this is volume is really the entwining of two books ("Juncto" and "Bonanza") with tenuous ongoing links: it’s like each the two storylines emit and absorb photons from the other throughout the 17-year span this episode covers.

I found the Jack Shaftoe storyline to be the most entertaining: a swashbuckling tale that spans the globe. He truly is the King of the Vagabonds. He acquires quite an interesting band of cohorts (the Cabal), and their adventures are varied and bizarre.

There isn’t as much Natural Philosophy in this book as there was in Quicksilver, but we do get to take a look at the birth of modern financial institutions.

On the whole, I enjoyed this tale, and I’ve got the final volume ("The System of the World") already on order to ship later this month. I might not jump right into it, though … maybe give it a little time.

Continue reading "The Confusion"

High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, Replication, Load-balancing, and More
By Jeremy D. Zawodny and Derek J. Balling

Just the book I was hoping it would be. Thanks to this book, I've rethought how to handle database indices, implemented a master-slave topology (for both optimizing read-only transactions and backup purposes), and learned some great ways to monitor and tune MySQL over time. And FeedBurner is better for it. Thanks, Zawodny & Balling. This one will probably sit on my Safari bookshelf for a while, as it's useful as a reference as well.

Continue reading "High Performance MySQL"

by Orson Scott Card

This third book in Card's "Shadow" series has drifted a bit from the promise of the first book ("Ender's Shadow"). I shouldn't be surpised, though: the same thing happened in the initial "Ender" series. In this epsiode, we continue to follow the cabal of teenagers that pretty much run the world. We get pseudo-geopolitical intrigue, some moral wrangling between resposibility to self and to other, and (ugh) an examination into the true nature of love.

These books are quick enough reads that I'll probably read the next Shadow book when it comes out, but that's only because "I'm in". That's a bad strategy for investing in stocks, and probably an equally bad strategy for choosing books to read, but there it is.

by Orson Scott Card

Well, if you liked Ender's Shadow, you'll like this book. I mean, who else is going to be reading this, right? You still have to accept the premise that the world is run by insanely intelligent teenagers sometime in the not-so-distant future. There really aren't many "sci-fi" ideas presented in this book: it's really more like the author is just using the environment he has established from the previous books as a backdrop for various moral and political quandries.

The main character, Bean, continues to be intriguing: he's a unique enough character to justify continuing reading this series. So, I'll probably move right along to reading Shadow Puppets as my next book.

Continue reading "Shadow of the Hegemon"

by Mark Haddon

A moving story told from the perspective of a 15-year-old autistic boy striving to achieve in this world. The author does an excellent job of conveying the terror and almost inconceivable hardship the narrator has in navigating everyday social situations. We really feel for this boy, even if he himself cannot feel.

This book reminded me of a couple of different books I've read this past year: The Dogs of Babel (which also uses a mysterious murder as a backdrop to an interesting character study) and The Corrections (which does a fantastic job of taking you inside the mind of someone suffering with Alzheimer's). It's a quick read, but a memorable one. Recommended.

Continue reading "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time"

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
by Michael Lewis

This might be the greatest business book I have ever read. I haven't had this much fun reading a book in a long time, and I attribute almost all of my enthusiasm to Michael Lewis' talents as a writer.

So, just to set the record straight, I don't really like baseball. Sure, I enjoy going to a Cubs game occasionally, but following the game is just not something that gets my blood flowing. Yet, this book is all about baseball and I can't stop raving about it. Why? Because it's not about baseball -- it's about challenging "conventional wisdom". It's about how market inefficiencies beget opportunities for those clever enough to recognized them. It's about the search for truth in the face of mocking disbelievers. It's about the courage to put your beliefs to the test no matter how unpopular or misunderstood your beliefs may be.

Read this book. You won't be sorry.

Continue reading "Moneyball"

by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason

I read this over the Memorial Day weekend on recommendation from my father-in-law. The plot summary immediately brings to mind The DaVinci Code: the adventures of four Princeton seniors trying to unravel the mysteries of the (actual) 15th-century text, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Mystery! Intrigue! Mur-derrr!

I liked this book a lot, for several reasons. First and foremost, all of the action takes place on the Princeton campus (my alma mater), which brought back some great memories. One of the authors attended Princeton, so the book does a very good job of describing a number of locales on campus, and I was able to follow along in my head when they talked about the different dorms and eating clubs.

Secondly, it's a genuine page-turner, and the air of mystery that surrounds this real book (the Hypnerotomachia) is fascinating. The means by which the main characters decode the riddles encoded into the text is plausible, and the conclusions they draw are equally believable.

Finally, the writing is erudite: several steps above Dan Brown, but not to the level of Umberto Eco (much to my relief). The authors prove themselves to be up to the task of tackling a wide variety of Renaissance topics in a very readable manner.

Sure, I have a number of criticisms about the book (one-dimensional characters and ungrounded abrupt plot jumps to name a couple), but on the whole this was a very enjoyable book made doubly so for me because of its setting.

Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley

What a prescient novel! The message from this book is as relevant today as when it was written in 1932 ... disturbingly so. It really causes you to question what qualities are truly valued by a culture or civilization. This story portrays a realistic scenario if "Community, Identity, Stability" were the core values of a world state. I think this book convincingly demonstrates that happiness at the expense of true freedom is a meaningless existence.

Continue reading "Brave New World"

The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron
By Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind

Wow, I felt positively slimy after reading this book. The authors did a fantastic job of describing the willful deception and naked greed that went on at the top levels of Enron. Really amazing stuff. Recommended.

Continue reading "The Smartest Guys in the Room"

By Carolyn Parkhurst

Intriguing premise (cribbed from Amazon.com): after his wife Lexy dies after falling from a tree, linguistics professor Paul Iverson becomes obsessed with teaching their dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Lorelei (the sole witness to the tragedy), to speak so he can find out the truth about Lexy's death--was it accidental or did Lexy commit suicide?

This was a surprisingly touching book with a few macabre detours sprinkled in. It earns some bonus points if you love dogs. As the story progresses, it neatly reflects the process of grief and the distortion of love, with enough mystery to keep the pages turning. I read the entire book during a flight back from San Francisco and I'm glad it wasn't any longer -- any longer and it would have gotten tiresome.

If you're looking for a quick read, like dogs and/or love stories, and don't mind some disturbing imagery, then I recommend you read this book.

The Devil in the White City : Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
By Erik Larson

Fascinating account of the 1893 Columbian (as in Christopher Columbus) World's Fair set in Chicago. It's hard to comprehend how much was accomplished in such a short amount of time -- the entire fair was assembled in less than two years. Also incredible is how many things we take for granted that had their genesis at this fair, from the Ferris wheel to alternating current (electricity) to chewing gum -- not to mention how the fair set the tone for architectural design and labor relations for the next half-century.

The book does a great job of balancing the coverage of the fair with the disturbing tale of H. H. Holmes, "The Devil" in this story. While the two stories don't really have a whole lot to do with each other (except the locale and time period), the author weaves them together effectively.

Continue reading "The Devil in the White City"

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
By Gregory Maguire

First off, this book is not some light satire ... oh no. This is a dark, supernatural examination of the origins of wickedness and our collective perspective on good and evil. It certainly is clever: taking a well-known and somewhat innocuous story like The Wizard of Oz and turning it on its head to really look at the motivations behind the various characters. The thing that surprised me the most is how incredibly deep and fantastic the author Gregory Maguire realizes the world of Oz. Oz is a dark place, and although most of the analogies to the plagues of this world (Earth) were transparent, they were appropriate and fitted into such a foreign context that the end result was effective.

I thought the first half of the book was better than the second, but the entire effort is strong enough that I recommend this to anyone that doesn't mind reading something that I would classify as "dark fantasy" (hmmm ... "dark fantasy" ... I wonder what kind of Google searches will find this page now!) It looks like the author has written a couple of other books that use the same "twist the well-known story around" device, but I'm not really tempted to read them even though I liked this book: the idea kind of seems like a one-trick pony. If anyone has a different opinion, please let me know!

Continue reading "Wicked"

Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker
By James McManus

This was a great book: James McManus, on an assignment for Harper's, decides to enter the World Series of Poker. This results in a most unexpected, wonderful story with a level of insight into the poker world that we haven't really seen before. Mix in some real-life intrigue surrounding the bizarre Ted Binion murder, add the fact that McManus is a very literate writer and you've got yourself a winner.

Over the past year or so I've been watching the World Poker Tour on the Travel Channel ... a practice that my wife compares to watching paint dry, but I find the game fascinating. This book has also given me some invaluable insight into the personalities that keep showing up in the professional poker circuit.

Thanks for the recommedation, Christian!

Continue reading "Positively Fifth Street"

Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving With Grace
By Gordon MacKenzie

Yep, my initial impressions were correct. In the immortal words of Eric Cartman, "It's all a bunch of tree huggin' hippie crap". I have a number of good friends that are "creative types" like this guy, but this is really just too much. I'd hate to be in a meeting with this guy. Or is that my insecurity talking? Hmmmm ... nope, I don't think so.

Continue reading "Orbiting the Giant Hairball"

The Bug: A Novel
By Ellen Ullman

This book turned out to be quite a disappointment. Really, just your typical "descent into madness" story that every lit major has written at one point or another. Diary of a madman. I thought the fact that it was set in a software development company would be interesting, and it was to a point, but the personalities are way too clichéd. That's not to say I haven't known a few programmers like the ones portrayed here, but the characters in the book are one-dimensional (and don't say that's the point!).

Ah well, you can't win them all.

Continue reading "The Bug"

Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics
By Peter Singer

Peter Singer is a modern philosopher that's not afraid to drive down some dark moral alleys. In this book, he tackles the topics of brain death, organ harvesting, abortion, infanticide, and animal rights. For the most part, he does a fantastic job of establishing a premise and then logically progressing to a conclusion that may leave our traditional ethics in shambles.

Dr. Singer's arguments related to quality of life, the rights of a fetus, and examining "brain death" for what it really is were persuasive and effective I thought. When he got to discussing the rights of animals as they relate to humans, though, I thought he got a little sloppy. Instead of leading you from A to B to C as he did earlier, he kind of goes from A to C to F, and ignores that there may be a G. His "consciousness equation" that he applies to infants born with only a brain stem, adults in a persistent vegetative state, and gorillas as a case against "speciesism" seems inappropriate and ignores the sum potential of each species. In my opinion, invalid generalizations lead to untenable conclusions.

This is not to say that I believe that animal testing is justifiable or that pro-life advocates that aren't vegans aren't hypocrites: my personal beliefs are beside the point. It just seems that Singer's past as a founder of the Australian Animal Rights Movement betray him a little bit here and reduces the effectiveness of the argument as a whole. It is, however, refreshing to see an author tackle such pregnant topics without fear.

By Neal Stephenson

Continue reading "Quicksilver"

The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 3)
By Neal Stephenson

What a journey this Baroque Cycle has been! This final book from Neal Stephenson in the trilogy wraps up the storylines that have been established from the previous two books, but really it's the early 18th-century England environment that Stephenson has realized that has impressed me the most. Reading these books has been a rewarding, memorable, and at times frustrating experience.

One nice thing about reading this book, for me, was that the time, place, and characters were familiar, so there wasn't as much of a "learning curve" getting started. This book is maybe a little slower moving (perhaps reflecting the advanced age of the main characters), but still chock full of interesting tidbits about the workings of modern financial markets, the challenges of maintaining a currency system, and fanciful look at the birth of computing. An excellent exchange between Newton and Leibniz marked the high point of the book for me.

For some reason, it seems like every story I have read by Neal Stephenson ends a little too abruptly; I often have trouble following the last chapter or so, like it's an action movie where the pacing is just a little too fast. You really have to pay attention, and after 3000 pages or so, I was a little weary, but on the whole I was happy with the resolutions.

I'm really glad I read these books, and I'm looking forward to reading Cryptonomicon again this summer, but I'm also a bit relieved that I can move on to other books now!

Continue reading "The System of the World"

By Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett

Continue reading "Good Omens"

By Ben Mezrich

Continue reading "Bringing Down the House"

By Carl Hiaasen

Continue reading "Tourist Season"

By Richard Harrison

Continue reading "Symbian OS C++ for Mobile Phones"

By Dave Pelz
Full Title: Dave Pelz's Short Game Bible: Master the Finesse Swing and Lower Your Score (Pelz, Dave. Dave Pelz Scoring Game Series, 1.)

Continue reading "Dave Pelz's Short Game Bible"

By Jennifer Vesperman

Continue reading "Essential CVS"

By Don Delillo

Continue reading "Cosmopolis: A Novel"

by J. K. Rowling

Continue reading "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"

By Dan Brown

Continue reading "The Da Vinci Code"

by Jonathan Franzen

Continue reading "The Corrections"