Holiday Reading

For the last 2.5 weeks I had been in Norway on holidays. I did not take my notebook, so I had to take a couple of books so I wouldn't disconnect from the software world :-) Here's what I read:

I started with Programming Erlang. I was curious to understand the buzz around this language in the context of concurrent systems. And I must say it looks like a very interesting language indeed. I am not sure I would agree with Ralph Johnson who says that Erlang could be the next Java, but it sure is an interesting approach to concurrency. Erlang is also interesting from a functional-language point of view.

Then I read Dierk König's Groovy in Action book. Now, this is a must-read for everybody: great topic (Groovy is really cool!), superbly written, many insights into programming language design in general. And wrt to Groovy: It really feels like this is the future of Java! Why would anybody want to use Java now that Groovy's around?

I then concluded with Beautiful Code, which, since it is an edited book, can't be judged as a whole. There are good, better and not-so-good chapters in it. I am still reading it now, and I am not sure I would recommend it wholeheartedly.

Anyway: I had something to do during the (few) rainy days in Norway, and I learned something along the way.  permalink