Cool books and what I'm up to
In which I let you know about some cool books and one technology I’ve been busy with that are well worth checking out.
I read a wonderful book recently: Shantaram. Check it out, it’s definitely worth it!
The second book I recommend you read (or study!) is called Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud. I’ve never encountered a book with such a high signal to noise ratio! It feels like pretty much every page lists a couple of ideas that completely changes the way I think about the history of many of our most fundamental ideas. This is a really interesting book.
The past three months I’ve had the pleasure of coding with Tom Locke (author of Hobo) on a very cool project of his. I’m learning a lot: half of what we’ve done is research cool ideas and the other half is hacking the good ones together in clever ways! :)
I’m writing the first of my final exams on Tuesday! Consequently, the past few weeks have been spent doing a lot more studying than hacking, but in a month’s time my exams will be over and the balance will be restored. Alongside my university studies I’ve started playing around with Scala again. Oddly, one of the things I like most about Scala is the fact that grok’ing its type system and other oddities is quite difficult. I find that this forces me to improve as programmer. I suspect that the better I understand Scala, the better programmer I’ll be.
I wanted to code a little app to help me get comfortable with coding in Scala so I’ve decided to build a little simulation of bots fighting each other. The plan is to design the class structure in a very modular fashion so I can plug in a complex graphical interface (read scala <-> CrystalSpace+blender, another fun project I’m looking forward to ;] ) or decision making model (sniper bots, assault bots, sneaky back-stabbing bots, etc.) in future.
A final ‘do check out’ would have to be LaTeX for generating documents containing mathematical equations. If you’re a teacher / student and you have to generate documents (eg. exam papers, assigment solutions, etc.) please do yourself a HUGE favour and check it out!
