Guus Bosman

On the way back from Washington after our holiday in Miami I read a well-known book: The Da Vinci Code.

The story has many unexpected twists, and it was a pleasure to read. It reminded me a lot of "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco, an undeniably brilliant book. It's probably not fair to compare the two books: the Da Vinci code is a novel, a thriller, while Foucault's Pendulum is much deeper and broader. Still, an enjoyable read and very addicting: I couldn't stop reading until I finished it.

This is a pleasantly written book that gives a nice overview of a number a Java frameworks to build web applications with. Most chapters didn't contain a lot of new information, but the comparison of the actual frameworks was quite useful. I knew Struts, Velocity and WebWork already, but Cocoon and Tapestry were new, as was Internetbeans.

I'd certainly recommend this book for software engineers who would like to know what's 'out there'. Personally I enjoyed Chapter 12.3 the most, in which the author shows how easy it is to upgrade an application to EJBs when there is a clean separation of the various concerns of the application.

The Cryptonomicon is a something like a hit amongst programmers and computer scientists. When I was in the plane to New York somebody even recognized me as a programmer because I was reading it.

I enjoyed reading the book. It was a pleasant mixture of treasure hunting, cryptology and World War II.

The book was a present Joris gave me for my 25th birthday.

Read it again in August 2014, during our trip to the Netherlands.

Sasha gave me this book when she came back the first time from the World Bank. It describes the circumstances and events that led to the crash of the stock market in October 1929, and the huge decline in the years that followed.

It's really interesting to read how ordinary people were involved in something (we know now) so historical and big. The books is not written from an economists' point of view, but more like an historicus. I had never really read about 1929 before, and this book is a good introduction, I liked it a lot.