Guus Bosman

software executive and technologist


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Here I keep track of some of the books that I've read, often with a short review and some personal thoughts. These are only a selection since I read a lot more books for work.

I like to read book in their original languages where possible: French, German, Dutch, English and I even read three books in Bulgarian. Here is the list of books I'd like to read. See also books about technology or management, and my all-time favorite books.

I'm an engineer, and enjoy science fiction novels. Some of my favorite authors are Vernor Vinge, Terry Pratchett and LE Modesitt Jr. No overview of my reading habits would be complete without mentioning The Economist -- I love that magazine.

Books below are in order of date read; this overview starts in October 2002.


Topic: 

Data-Intensive Text Processing with MapReduce

It's beautiful to see a real change in paradigm happening. I remember in college how much I enjoyed programming in functional languages, and how cool it is to be able to look at problems from a different viewpoint. What Google and others have achieved with MapReduce a similar change in the way of looking at problems.

MapReduce is the name of Google's base algorithm for their processing of huge data sets. Since then, other companies have followed suit. I didn't know much about this field and this book is a great introduction. It provides a good description of the foundation, and I love it that it describes practical uses. Examples they gave are machine translations, Google's PageRank, shortest path in a graph etc.

Actually in use

What I like about MapReduce is that it provides an abstraction for distributed computing that is actually being used and is succesful. The book showed the scaling characteristics of an example algorithm (strips for computing word co-occurrence) on Hadoop: a R^2 of 0.997! That means that there is almost a linear scalability increase when you add extra machines.

Want to read more

This is one of those books that makes you want to read more. For example, since reading this book I've looked into terms such as Zipfian, Brewer's CAP Theorem and Heap's Law. I still need to learn more about Expectation Maximization and "Hidden Markov Models", harping back on some fundamental mathematics I had in college.

I want to read more about machine translations now, Koehn's book perhaps. And definitely want to read the Google article, about "unreasonable effectiveness of data".

This is an excellent book, which provides a very readable introduction to the algorithms and real-world implementations.

Jimmy Lin, Chris Dyer
9781608453429
/images/books/mapreduce.jpg
English for work

Going Dutch -- How England Plundered Holland's Glory

An interesting book about William III, the Dutch stadtholder who became King of England in 1688, and more in general the relation between Holland and England in the 17th century.

The books deals extensively with the connections between the Netherlands and England at that time, such as in science, in the shared taste in gardens and painting and in political connections. Constantijn Huygens played a big role in developing this shared taste, according to the author.

The author makes the case that the societies in England and Holland were closely intertwined and mutually influenced each other. This in contrast to the publisher's comments on the cover and the strange subtitle which talk about "plundering" Holland's glory. The author writes: "...here was no conquest, here was an affinity -- a meeting of minds and sensibilities."

Ultimately, William III died without having any children and the English thrown went to his wife's sister. One benefit for the Dutch though, was that William and Mary sent back large amounts of (mostly Dutch) paintings from London to Het Loo, where many of them still are.

The book is well written, if a bit wordy at times, and provides a fascinating glimpse of life at the royals courts in Holland and England. The author used a wide range of source materials to enliven the book.

There are many fascinating stories and details in the book. It was great to read about Newton and Huygens and their work together, and to read about governor Winthrop in the British colony of Connecticut who was looking forward to read the book about the discovery of the planets of Saturn.

A recommended read for history buffs, especially if you have an interest in Western Europe in the 17th century.

Lisa Jardine
9780060774080
/images/books/goingdutch.jpg
English

Het Heelal

Het Heelal is the Dutch edition of Hawking's classic A Brief History of Time. I brought this copy from Holland a few weeks ago. It was on my parent's attic in our boxes so I'm sure it's my copy, but I don't remember how I got it.

It's not the first time I read this book, and last winter I read several articles by Hawkings, but it's always a great read. The idea of a time-space continuum is appealing, but difficult to understand, I'll admit.

It was interesting to read the book in Dutch (I usually try to read books in their original English, but hey, I had it on my bookshelves). The translator had Hawkings use Dam Square in Amsterdam as a reference point. Good translations though.

Stephen Hawking
/images/books/hetheelal.jpg
Dutch
Topic: 

Twee Vrouwen

Twee Vrouwen (Twice a Woman) is a book by Dutch author Harry Mulish, who recently passed away. It had been a while since I read a book in Dutch. It's so much easier than reading in French! Harry Mulish is one of my favorite Dutch authors, but there are many books of him that I haven't read.

My grandmother gave us a copy when I visited the Netherlands a few weeks ago. The book is from 1975 but it was republished in 2008 for the promotional Nederland Leest event.

I greatly enjoyed the book; it's a straight forward story but with many different layers and a lot of symbolism.

Harry Mulisch
/images/books/tweevrouwen.jpg
Dutch
Topic: 

HTML5 for Web Designers

HTML5 for Web Designers is a short and pleasant introduction to HTML5.

The book, 87 pages long, is published by the folks of A List Apart, a blog about website design that I follow. It's a quick read -- the book probably took me no more than 30 minutes -- and it gives you the highlights of HTML5 quickly. The introduction, with the history of the development of HTML standards, was interesting.

HTML5

Web Forms 2.0 is very useful. I think the micro-format like elements such as mark and time are good additions, but I'm not so sure about the new structure elements. The article vs section is a little confusing, and I'm not sure what their added value is. I'm not so convinced of the benefits of the more flexible nesting and outlining that the author describes.

Obviously, the standardization of video and audio playback is huge (as long as we can all agree on the encoding...).

For my work, the Web Forms 2.0 elements are probably going to be the most useful: marking fields as required, specifying that input fields can take numeric input only, etc. Today we use JavaScript libraries for this. A library like ExtJS already allows you to specify this declaratively but native browser support would be even better.

The book purposely did not go into the new standardized JavaScript APIs that are part of HTML5, that would be a nice topic to read on.

Jeremy Keith
97809844425008
/images/books/html5webdesigners.jpg
English for work
Topic: 

L'étranger

L'étranger de Albert Camus.

La texte n'était pas très facile, naturallement, mais je suis très content que j'ai le compris.

Albert Camus
/images/books/letranger.jpg
French
Topic: 

Salut et Liberté

"Salut et liberté" est le deuxième livre que j'ai lu en français.

Ce livre de Fred Vargas a deux nouvelles policiers, "Salut et liberté" et "La nuit des brutes".

Je ne lis pas souvent des policiers en anglais, mais ces nouvelles m'ont beaucoup plu. On veut lire encore et encore, pour savoir qui est le meurtrier! C'est très bon pour la motivation.

Il y a des personages intéressants. Les personnages principaux sont le commissaire Adamsberg et lieutenant Danglard. Madame Vargas a écrit plusieurs nouvelles dans lesquelles ils figuraient. Il y a aussi des personnages anormaux, comme l'homme qui veut un citre dans la prison, ou l'homme qui s'assoit toute la journée sur un banc devant le commissariat avec un porte-manteau...

Un très agréable livre; je voudrais lire encore de Madame Vargas.

(Cette critique de livre a était corrigée avec Lang-8).

Fred Vargas
2290321443
/images/books/salutetliberte.jpg
French
Topic: 

Germinal

C'est mon première livre en Francais pour quince années.

Ceci n'est pas le livre complète; c'est un adaption en 1400 mots. Mais, c'est très utile.

L'histoire est très beau.

Émile Zola
/images/books/germinal.jpg
French
Topic: 

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Pretentious and stuffy -- this was not a fun book to read. But it's on my list of books I wanted to read, so I struggled through it.

An example of the gratuitous pompous language:

"Its alternation of sad human ineffectualness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him, and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving."

The long description of hell was interesting -- clearly, this was on the author's mind a lot.

I could hardly wait until I finished this book. This is the second coming-of-age book that I really didn't like, the other was The Catcher in the Rye.

In any case, I know now that I will not try to read Ulysses.

James Joyce
/images/books/portraitartist.jpg
English

Of the farm

Nice novel by John Updike. Paul, the main character, has a difficult relationship with his mother:

"My heart was thudding; my tingling fingers felt swollen around the cold core of the wine-glass stem. My mother's silences, in which her soul plunged backwards from her eyes and mouth and revisited the darkness in which, but for her grace, I would be buried unborn, were as terrible as ever."

The book deals with divorce, 'toxic mother', etc. Not really my style of story, but beautifully written. Read the last pages in Georgetown.

John Updike
9780141189024
/images/books/ofthefarm.jpg
English

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