Compilers Dragon Book

While on a short vacation over in Kent my wife and I have been visiting various second hand book shops in Whitstable and Canterbury.

I was fortunate enough to stumble upon a hard backed copy of "Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools" (Aho, Sethi, Ullman ISBN: 0321486811) also know as "The Dragon Book" which is the definitive compiler techniques undergraduate book - it is the compiler writers' Bible. The Amazon reviews on this tome speak for themselves.

The amusing thing was that last week I was rummaging around my book collection and could not find my original paper back copy and recalled I loaned it to somebody and never got it back and realised that buying another new copy would be an expensive proposition.

Well, the copy I just acquired is in near mint condition - I suspect the student who bought read the first chapter and then gave up since this book requires some intellectual effort to work through. I got it for £3.65 which is a little cheaper than the £50.99 being asked for the hardback copy at Amazon.co.uk. Result!

For those who haven't read this book, sample chapters can be found here. Also, the errata sheet for the book can be found here.

Blog Vacation

I won't be doing any blog postings over the next two weeks for a couple of reasons:

1. I'm going to be focusing on family quality time,
2. It's time to re-charge and take a break.

So, while I'm away from this blog, perhaps you could write some comments on stuff you'd like to see covered in this blog. Let me know what's good, what's bad and what can be improved.

I'm looking to keep this blog fairly technical, but I'd like to know if it's worth pushing out the same kind of content all the time. I'm open to new ideas, feedback and general comments!

Thanks... and keep in touch! Colin.

Totem-tastic! BBC podcasts!

The Totem media player on Ubuntu has the ability to download the current podcast list from the BBC with minimum fuss. It's great for catching up on missed BBC radio podcasts when I've been out of the UK or too busy to hear them in real-time.

To get to the podcasts, fire up Totem with Applications->Sound & Video->Movie Player and then on the Playlist drop down (top right) select BBC and in a few moments Totem will have downloaded the contents index and you can browse and select the podcast you desire.



Pity this feature isn't promoted more. It saves one from rummaging around on the BBC website looking for relevant podcasts. Totem-tastic!

Git Version Control Books

Sometimes events occur like buses turning up: not a lot of activity and then suddenly two or three arrive in one go. Well, I can gladly say this applies to quality books on Git.

Several weeks ago I received from Amazon my long awaited copy of "Version Control with Git: Powerful tools and techniques for collaborative software development" by Jon Loeliger. For about £18 and at 328 pages it's fairly good value; it contains a good deal of tutorial style hands-on examples and also the in-depth know-how that one expects from a good technical book. Not bad at all really.

 Today my colleague Amit twittered about another Git book "Pro Git" (Amazon, £19.24) by Scott Chacon and published by Apress. This book is available on-line under the Creative Commons license as well in printed form too. The great feature of this book is that it's been put up on GitHub and then forked and translated into other languages such as German, Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Anyhow, this looks to be another great Git book, and well worth looking at too.

So now there's no excuse for not getting to grips with git - here are a couple of quality text books to help new and experienced uses with daily git usage!