{"id":840,"date":"2013-09-22T15:59:27","date_gmt":"2013-09-22T20:59:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/?page_id=840"},"modified":"2016-05-29T13:35:14","modified_gmt":"2016-05-29T18:35:14","slug":"books-im-reading","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/?page_id=840","title":{"rendered":"Books I’m Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Pursuit of the Unknown<\/strong><\/a>
\n17 Equations That Changed the World<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"In<\/a><\/p>\n

Most people are familiar with history\u2019s great equations: Newton\u2019s Law of Gravity, for instance, or Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity. But the way these mathematical breakthroughs have contributed to human progress is seldom appreciated. In In Pursuit of the Unknown, celebrated mathematician Ian Stewart untangles the roots of our most important mathematical statements to show that equations have long been a driving force behind nearly every aspect of our lives. Using seventeen of our most crucial equations\u2014including the Wave Equation that allowed engineers to measure a building\u2019s response to earthquakes, saving countless lives, and the Black-Scholes model, used by bankers to track the price of financial derivatives over time\u2014Stewart illustrates that many of the advances we now take for granted were made possible by mathematical discoveries. An approachable, lively, and informative guide to the mathematical building blocks of modern life, In Pursuit of the Unknown is a penetrating exploration of how we have also used equations to make sense of, and in turn influence, our world.<\/p>\n

A Software Engineer Learns HTML5, JavaScript and jQuery<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"HTML5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A Software Engineer Learns HTML5, JavaScript and jQuery guides you through the process I went through as an experienced software engineer, writing a large-scale, standards based web-application for the first time. It is intended to teach you the fundamentals of HTML5, JavaScript and jQuery – without presenting you with long lists of APIs, or intricate details of every feature (these can be found in reference manuals).
\nThis book is not a simple introduction to the subject matter: it guides you through the process of building a feature-rich web application. The application begins simple, and becomes gradually more complex as additional APIs and features are introduced.<\/p>\n

Thinking, Fast and Slow<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Thinking,<\/a><\/p>\n

In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation\u2014each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.<\/p>\n

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives\u2014and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.<\/p>\n

The Essential Engineer<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"TEE\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From the acclaimed author of The Pencil<\/i> and To Engineer Is Human<\/i>, The Essential Engineer<\/i> is an eye-opening exploration of the ways in which science and engineering must work together to address our world\u2019s most pressing issues, from dealing with climate change and the prevention of natural disasters to the development of efficient automobiles and the search for renewable energy sources. While the scientist may identify problems, it falls to the engineer to solve them. It is the inherent practicality of engineering, which takes into account structural, economic, environmental, and other factors that science often does not consider, that makes engineering vital to answering our most urgent concerns.<\/p>\n

Henry Petroski takes us inside the research, development, and debates surrounding the most critical challenges of our time, exploring the feasibility of biofuels, the progress of battery-operated cars, and the question of nuclear power. He gives us an in-depth investigation of the various options for renewable energy\u2014among them solar, wind, tidal, and ethanol\u2014explaining the benefits and risks of each. Will windmills soon populate our landscape the way they did in previous centuries? Will synthetic trees, said to be more efficient at absorbing harmful carbon dioxide than real trees, soon dot our prairies? Will we construct a \u201csunshade\u201d in outer space to protect ourselves from dangerous rays? In many cases, the technology already exists. What\u2019s needed is not so much invention as engineering.<\/p>\n

Just as the great achievements of centuries past\u2014the steamship, the airplane, the moon landing\u2014once seemed beyond reach, the solutions to the twenty-first century\u2019s problems await only a similar coordination of science and engineering. Eloquently reasoned and written, The Essential Engineer<\/i> identifies and illuminates these problems\u2014and, above all, sets out a course for putting ideas into action.<\/p>\n

The Code Book<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"The-Code-Book-Singh-Simon-9780385495325\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In his first book since the bestselling\u00a0Fermat’s Enigma<\/b>, Simon Singh offers the first sweeping history of encryption, tracing its evolution and revealing the dramatic effects codes have had on wars, nations, and individual lives. From Mary, Queen of Scots, trapped by her own code, to the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II, to the incredible (and incredibly simple) logisitical breakthrough that made Internet commerce secure,\u00a0The Code Book<\/b>\u00a0tells the story of the most powerful intellectual weapon ever known: secrecy.<\/p>\n

Throughout the text are clear technical and mathematical explanations, and portraits of the remarkable personalities who wrote and broke the world’s most difficult codes. Accessible, compelling, and remarkably far-reaching, this book will forever alter your view of history and what drives it.\u00a0\u00a0It will also make yo wonder how private that e-mail you just sent really is.<\/p>\n

UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"UNIX_Linux_SysAdmin_Book\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In addition to comprehensive updates and the addition of scores of new topics, this twentieth anniversary edition of the world’s best-selling UNIX system administration book has been enhanced with coverage of several leading Linux distributions: Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.<\/p>\n

This book approaches system administration from a practical perspective and is an invaluable reference for both new administrators and experienced professionals. It details best practices for every facet of system administration, including storage management, network design and administration, email, web hosting, scripting, software configuration management, performance analysis, Windows interoperability, virtualization, DNS, security, management of IT service organizations, and much more.<\/p>\n

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"TUBES\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Almost everything about our day-to-day lives\u2014and the broader scheme of human culture\u2014can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first voyages. The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Until now.<\/p>\n

In Tubes, journalist Andrew Blum goes inside the Internet\u2019s physical infrastructure and flips on the lights, revealing an utterly fresh look at the online world we think we know. It is a shockingly tactile realm of unmarked compounds, populated by a special caste of engineer who pieces together our networks by hand; where glass fibers pulse with light and creaky telegraph buildings, tortuously rewired, become communication hubs once again. From the room in Los Angeles where the Internet first flickered to life to the caverns beneath Manhattan as new fiber-optic cable is buried; from the coast of Portugal, where a ten-thousand-mile undersea cable just two thumbs wide connects Europe and Africa, to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have built monumental data centers\u2014Blum chronicles the dramatic story of the Internet\u2019s development, explains how it all works, and takes the first ever in-depth look inside its hidden monuments.<\/p>\n

This is a book about real places on the map: their sounds and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there. For all the talk of the \u201cplacelessness\u201d of our digital age, the Internet is as fixed in real, physical spaces as the railroad or telephone. You can map it and touch it, and you can visit it. Is the Internet in fact \u201ca series of tubes\u201d as Ted Stevens, the late senator from Alaska, once famously described it? How can we know the Internet\u2019s possibilities if we don\u2019t know its parts?<\/p>\n

Like Tracy Kidder\u2019s classic The Soul of a New Machine or Tom Vanderbilt\u2019s recent bestseller Traffic, Tubes combines on-the-ground reporting and lucid explanation into an engaging, mind-bending narrative to help us understand the physical world that underlies our digital lives.<\/p>\n

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Information<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From the bestselling author of the acclaimed\u00a0Chaos\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Genius<\/em>\u00a0comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory.
\n\u00a0<\/em>
\nAcclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa\u2019s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live.<\/p>\n

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"Code\"<\/a>
Code<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What do flashlights, the British invasion, black cats, and seesaws have to do with computers? In CODE, they show us the ingenious ways we manipulate language and invent new means of communicating with each other. And through CODE, we see how this ingenuity and our very human compulsion to communicate have driven the technological innovations of the past two centuries.<\/p>\n

Using everyday objects and familiar language systems such as Braille and Morse code, author Charles Petzold weaves an illuminating narrative for anyone who\u2019s ever wondered about the secret inner life of computers and other smart machines.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a cleverly illustrated and eminently comprehensible story\u2014and along the way, you\u2019ll discover you\u2019ve gained a real context for understanding today\u2019s world of PCs, digital media, and the Internet. No matter what your level of technical savvy, CODE will charm you\u2014and perhaps even awaken the technophile within.<\/p>\n

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

\"TECS\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the early days of computer science, the interactions of hardware, software, compilers, and operating system were simple enough to allow students to see an overall picture of how computers worked. With the increasing complexity of computer technology and the resulting specialization of knowledge, such clarity is often lost. Unlike other texts that cover only one aspect of the field, The Elements of Computing Systems gives students an integrated and rigorous picture of applied computer science, as its comes to play in the construction of a simple yet powerful computer system.Indeed, the best way to understand how computers work is to build one from scratch, and this textbook leads students through twelve chapters and projects that gradually build a basic hardware platform and a modern software hierarchy from the ground up. In the process, the students gain hands-on knowledge of hardware architecture, operating systems, programming languages, compilers, data structures, algorithms, and software engineering. Using this constructive approach, the book exposes a significant body of computer science knowledge and demonstrates how theoretical and applied techniques taught in other courses fit into the overall picture.Designed to support one- or two-semester courses, the book is based on an abstraction-implementation paradigm; each chapter presents a key hardware or software abstraction, a proposed implementation that makes it concrete, and an actual project. The emerging computer system can be built by following the chapters, although this is only one option, since the projects are self-contained and can be done or skipped in any order. All the computer science knowledge necessary for completing the projects is embedded in the book, the only pre-requisite being a programming experience.The book’s web site provides all tools and materials necessary to build all the hardware and software systems described in the text, including two hundred test programs for the twelve projects. The projects and systems can be modified to meet various teaching needs, and all the supplied software is open-source.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Pursuit of the Unknown 17 Equations That Changed the World Most people are familiar with history\u2019s great equations: Newton\u2019s Law of Gravity, for instance, or Einstein\u2019s theory of relativity. But the way these mathematical breakthroughs have contributed to human progress is seldom appreciated. In In Pursuit of the Unknown, celebrated mathematician Ian Stewart untangles … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":31,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-840","page","type-page","status-publish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1292,"href":"https:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/840\/revisions\/1292"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nodakengineering.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}