books

22 Aug

Wired's Interview with Fred Brooks

in books, design, man-month

I've been reading about Fred Brooks' new book The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist. Of course, I've had Brooks' earlier book, The Mythican Man-Month, on my reading list for many years now. I assume you know the basic premise there about how adding extra engineers to a project doesn't necessarily result in a speedier development cycle. Wired has an interview up with Brooks about his book. There aren't a lot of insights there, but it's interesting to see that Brooks now sees the benefit of encapsulation and how much faster hardware has accelerated compared to software.

Anyway, has anyone read the new book? I'd love to hear your opinion.

 

22 Feb

Matt Interviews R.A. Montgomery (author/publisher of Choose Your Own Adventure)

in books, choose your own adventure, games, videos

Hi, everyone. Been awhile since I posted any updates, but a timely email from Charlie concerning the little bit part I've been playing in Stargate Universe sent me back here to see how ol' Kairosnews has been doing. Anyway, I thought you might enjoy a video interview I did recently with R.A. Montgomery, author and publisher of the famous Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series of books for young people. Mr. Montgomery and I talked about many topics related to the books, including his thoughts on education. Enjoy!

11 Aug

Good Texts for an Upper Level Computers & Writing Class

in books, computers and writing

Hi, everyone. I want to ask your advice about choosing a textbook or two for my English 403/503 class called "Computers & English." I want to teach it as an intro to new media type course with a focus on doing projects rather than theoretical readings. I don't really want it to have a pedagogical focus; it should be more focused on writing with some new media stuff like blogs and wikis. I also thought about doing a Flash movie or maybe an interactive project of some sort (PPT or Flash, maybe?).

14 Oct

Books, Books, Books

in books, Chronicle of Higher Education, Digital Library, google, HathiTrust, Public Domain

The Chronicle of Higher Education this week announced that HathiTrust is now open. HathiTrust is composed of a large group of several universities interested in preserving the work Google has done with digitalizing hundreds of thousands of books. HathiTrust, working to become the biggest library in the world, with Google's help has currently digitized "2,108,109" volumes. Other stats include:

Currently Digitized
2,108,109 volumes

02 Jul

Dungeons and Desktops on Slashdot

in books, crpg, games, history, role-playing, role-playing games, rpg

Just in case Matt Barton is too shy to mention it himself, his recent book Dungeons and Desktops has been slashdotted.