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I recently finished reading Coders at Work, written by Peter Seibel (@peterseibel), and published by Apress. What an amazing book to read, I can’t even begin to express how much I actually enjoyed this book, and I know I am gushing, but this was a real treat for me.

I have always been amazed by the past of computing, the idea of computers as large as houses, filling entire warehouses for simple punch card technology, hell punch cards! I love hearing the stories of how things were, getting the first networks going, writing the first program for any technology, making something that everyone everywhere now uses and doesn’t think twice about why it works the way it works.

In Coders At Work Peter Seibel interviews some of the legends of technology including Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google Inc.), Jamie Zawinkski (major Mozilla contributor, @jwz), and plenty more.

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Linux Administration: A Beginners Guide

As Wale Soyinka claims at the beginning, Linux Administration: A Beginner’s Guide, Fifth Edition; is a book for beginners, not for “dummies.” He assumes you know most of the basic terms and concepts needed to run a modest Windows network. This book explains the “why” for many of the facets in running a Linux server, to further complete your knowledge of your system and to understand the options available to you when setting up and tweaking your server to suit your needs.

It covers so many topics that it understandably doesn’t go into a lot of detail on some of them.  But then again, this is not an expert’s guide.  It will, however, help you get pretty familiar with the tools you’ll need and even provides background information about how certain programs evolved.  The content was kept fresh by the author adding gems of humor and making the text read a lot less like a math book than I expected.

There are plenty of command line examples strewn throughout the book, and human-readable explanations of each option you have available to you. Because sometimes, Linux’s man page documentation is too cryptic for those not intimately familiar with an application.  This adds to the book’s value as a reference manual for when you can’t remember everything you read.

This book filled in a lot of the holes in my education concerning Linux and administration in general.  A good investment for anyone looking to start their own solid Linux server, or a reference book for the more seasoned admin. From reading this book, I feel much more confident in my admin-abilities and have solid ground to reach higher levels of Linux administration.  All of which of course, adds to my value as an employee!

Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziade (PacktPub.com)

Expert Python Programming was not what I was expecting to get from a book about Python. I am not a savvy python programmer yet, and in my quest to become one I picked this book up to read. It certainly is not for beginners, and I mean that. If you are not comfortable you may wish to skip it, if you are daring and have the basics of programming down then you can slip this one into your collection.

Tarek Ziade presents, for the most part, best practices and design patterns. Chapters 8 through 14 really are just that, explaining how to be a really great python programmer. From Test-driven design, to Optimization he covers all the bases and if the suggestions and steps are followed even the worst of programmers (no matter the language) could become an expert programmer.

Chapters 2 and 3 literally blew my mind, I mean that! The concepts aren’t earth shattering, but they are really good and indepth. I am glad I had the chance to review the book and read those chapters as they gave me some great insight to the language of Python. 

Overall this book has really opened my eyes to the powers of Python and even more how to be a better programmer in general. Thanks Tarek!

You can pick up this novel of awesome at Amazon.com, or check out more details on the book at PacktPub.com.