My Books to Read page: May 2009

Why?

Books to read for fun

Ursula Leguin

Ursula LeGuin makes me proud to spend most of my free time with nose in sci-fi speculative fiction books. Looks like she finally produced a new book!

* Lavina

Kage Baker

Where can I find the Children of Company novels, in order? Is there an order?

Patrick Rothfuss

Name of the Wind hooked me. Where is the next one? Wake me up when it's done.

David Gerrold

Maybe Rothfuss will finish his books before David Gerrold finishes the war of the Chtorr. I think I grew out of that series, and then grew up enough that I could read it anyway. Damn artistes.

Serious Reading

Trigonometry for dummies (in progress)

Backlog of serious reading

• Either "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" or "Getting Things Done: The art of stress-free productivity".
• Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences: Need to keep the math fresh.
• NHibernate in action. (In progress.) NHibernate only seems necessary to me because other people think it's necessary. I've never had a problem it purports to solve. The unit of work and caching in it is decent, but too tied into other crap to be be useful. Is there any ROI? Have to learn a clunkly framework that will be legacy in a few years.
• I'll probably find a good ASP.NET MVC book and read it before I force myself to dig into NHibernate.

Read and digesting

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans: This is the classic
• Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns, Nilson: A good folks read, which just enough to disagree with.

Books on my Safari account - used for occasional skimming

• Clean Code (great)
• IronPython in Action: Just started
• C# 3.0 in a nutshell: Perhaps Worth buying?
• Deploying .NET applications: Disappointing.

Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns, Nillson (read ... drafting review)

Serious reading, looking for

• Books on running and exercise that are not lame.
• Books on finance.
• Behavior Driven Design.
• Content management, collaboration, OpenID

Hello, World in msbuild

I haven't blogged in a while. Here is a msbuild "Hello, World" for you.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project DefaultTargets="Build;Test" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
       <WhoToGreet>World</WhoToGreet>
  </PropertyGroup>

  <Target Name="Hello">
    <Message Text="Hello, $(WhoToGreet)" Importance="high" ></Message>
  </Target>

  <!-- A build target is required. -->
  <Target Name="Build" DependsOnTargets="Hello"/>
  <!-- A test target is required. -->
  <Target Name="Test"/>  
</Project>

Execute as : msbuild helloworld.proj

or : msbuild helloworld.proj /p:WhoToGreet="Moon"