Category Archives: Books

About books I’m reading, have read, or would like to read.

Review: War and Peace and War

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Jacques Chester

Grand theories of history never quite go out of fashion. The impossible complexity of human society so cheerfully refutes our understanding that we have to fall back on intuitive pattern-matching to make sense of it (after a while, this becomes … Continue reading →

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Review: Drift into Failure

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Jacques Chester

Drift into Failure, by Sidney Dekker, is one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in a while. “Thought provoking” is usually a shorthand used by buttered-up friends of the author to mean “I agree” or “he/she provided a great … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Systems | 2 Comments

Review: Venture Deals

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Jacques Chester

It occurred to me recently that, while I plough through a lot of books on my Kindle, I’ve not made an attempt to keep any sort of notes. As Mortimer Adler points out in How to Read A Book, books … Continue reading →

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Discipline

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Jacques Chester

I’ve decided to work through the exercises in Watts Humphrey’s A Discipline for Software Engineering, to see whether they’ll help me to be a better developer. With any luck I’ll remember to update the blog with my findings. A Discipline … Continue reading →

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Too many books

Posted on January 10, 2010 by Jacques Chester

It turns out that I have so many books stuffed away in my Amazon cart’s “Saved Items” section that I’ve exceeded the maximum limit. In case you’re wondering, Amazon won’t let you store more than 600 titles in that list. … Continue reading →

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