Feed"The Story of Art" by E. H. Gombrich is a classic and popular book that charts the evolution of art through the ages. Using a plain language and written in a non-condescending style (sadly quite rare for the art books that I have seen in my life), it is a book that I wish I had read much earlier in my life. It would make a great gift for a teenager to gently initiate them into the wonderful world of art.
News Archive for 2009
[2009-11-08] "The Story of Art"
[2009-11-05] "Paris"
"Paris" by Colin Jones is a history of the city of Paris, covering the period of about 2,000 years from its days as the Roman camp of Lutetia to the present. The author chronicles its rise to prominence as one of the greatest cities in the world and a major centre for art and fashion. He does not shy away from talking about the horrible attrocities of its past either. This is a book written by someone who clearly loves the city for what it is and what it has been.
[2009-11-02] "Buyology"
"Buyology" by Martin Lindstrom is a book that purports to show that our subconscious drives our buying decisions in ways that we rarely suspect. Marketers can successfully sell products to their target consumers by understanding these factors; otherwise their campaigns are a waste of time, effort and money. The author tries to back these claims by citing the results of some studies.
[2009-09-12] "101 Essential Tips: Wine"
"101 Essential Tips: Wine" by Tom Stevenson is an introductory little book for those interested in wine. It is a copiously-illustrated book with easy-to-read text and is so small that it can be finished in just a single sitting. It serves its purpose fairly well, though the title is a little misleading.
[2009-06-05] "An Introduction to Database Systems"
"An Introduction to Database Systems" by Christopher J. Date is a classic text-book on database concepts by one of the foremost writers and thinkers in the field. The book has been kept fairly up-to-date over the years by the author and includes topics like logic databases, temporal databases, decision support systems, object databases, object-relational databases, etc. Most of the book however concentrates on the relational data model and relational database management systems. This is not surprising since most of the popular database management systems today are based on this model and the author too clearly prefers this data model over all the others.
[2009-05-17] "Computer Networks"
"Computer Networks" by Andrew S. Tanenbaum is a comprehensive text-book on the topic written by an author with many popular text-books to his credit. There are more than 800 pages in this book, though the prose is fairly accessible and peppered with the entertaining wit and sarcasm that is the hallmark of the author's text-books. Even though its 2002 vintage shows through every now and then, the book on the whole is fairly up-to-date and still quite relevant. It is therefore a great text-book from which to teach yourself about computer networks.
[2009-04-19] "Operating System Concepts"
"Operating System Concepts" by Abraham Silberschatz, Peter Galvin and Greg Gagne is a text-book that teaches the basics of operating systems design. As is implied by the title, the book focuses more on the concepts than their implementation. Almost all the concepts that you need to know to appreciate the working of an operating system are explained here and illustrated with numerous case studies.
[2009-03-30] "Computer Architecture"
"Computer Architecture" by John Hennessy and David Patterson is an advanced text on the subject that is a sequel to their other book "Computer Organization and Design". The authors assume in this book that the reader is already familiar with the topics introduced in the other book and build upon these topics. Even then there is a fair amount of overlap among these books that is a bit irritating if you have only recently read the other book.
[2009-03-20] "Computer Organization and Design"
"Computer Organization and Design" by David Patterson and John Hennessy is an introductory text on this subject for budding computer scientists and computer engineers. The field has been in a state of constant flux in recent times and this book serves as an excellent reference even for professionals, since its authors have kept it up-to-date with all the latest developments. The downside is that such a book becomes dated pretty quickly by its very nature, assuming the field continues its breakneck pace of development even into the near future.
[2009-03-15] "Data Structures and Algorithms"
"Data Structures and Algorithms" by Alfred Aho, Jeffrey Ullman and John Hopcroft is a relatively-short introductory text for data structures and algorithms useful for computer programming. It covers a surprisingly-broad set of topics considering its size. It is fairly dated now but it still has all the essential data structures, algorithms and algorithm analysis techniques.
[2009-02-19] "Irrational Exuberance"
Robert Shiller (of the Case-Shiller housing index fame) is one of the few level-headed economists who have been able to recognise and point out market bubbles in the making and who have had the courage to stand by their analyses even in the face of ridicule. His book "Irrational Exuberance" became famous for calling out the stock-market bubble in the US when it was published in early 2000, just some time before the bubble burst. The second edition of the book has again been remarkable for pointing out the housing-market bubble in the US when it was published in 2005, though this time it took a little over a year since then for the bubble to burst.
[2009-01-06] "The New Cambridge History of India: Vijayanagara"
After our recent trip to Hampi, Anusha and I became quite curious to know more about the history of the Vijayanagara empire. Our high-school text-books on history barely touched upon the rise and the fall of this great empire that ruled over almost all of southern India for about three centuries beginning in the 14th century. We picked up Burton Stein's "The New Cambridge History of India: Vijayanagara" mainly because at about 150 pages it looked like a more manageable read than the other such books. It was also far more recent than the other books and therefore had a much better chance of incorporating the findings from recent research into this aspect of Indian history.
