After the horrible dissappointment with the third book from the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsay, I even forgot there was a fourth book coming. Thanks to my friend Meaflux, who kindly remembered me to not miss on my education as a serial killer, I found out the fourth book, Dexter by Design, was out and, (thank you, Jeff!), without any of the fantasy monster crap that made Dexter in the Dark so bad.

Dexter by Design was a really nice book. It captured the dark humour only a geeky psychopath would have, caught in a world of emotional people, it added a lot of tension, it went cursively from start to end. The only problem I could possibly have with it is that it made Dexter look bad, easily surclasses by not one but three people on three separate ocasions.

The conclusion is that it was one of the best, if not THE best in the series. Not a lot of killing is done, though, not by Dexter in any case. And if you are wondering, it has no connection with the third season of the Dexter TV series, except for the ending :).

The last book (in story time) in the Deepgate Codex series, God of Clocks was a huge disappointment. It started nicely enough, preparing us for epic battles of wit and weirdness. Reading it, I was about to forget all about the slight drop in quality in the second book, Iron Angel, and was preparing for something grand. Then Mr. Campbell did what he never should have done: he altered the time space continuum. Before I knew it I was thinking at that old sci-fi movie where a ship boards another ship while in hyperspace and because of chaotical relativistic effects they all end up getting old, then young, then meeting themselves, fighting along their older grandsons, fighting the enemy with sticks and so on. For the love of God, I don't remember the name and I did Google it, but got only crap pages.

Anyway, Mr. Campbell, haven't you watched sci fi movies until now? Haven't you read a lot of SF books that make the same mistake, drowning in their own pool of possibilities. Time travel, unless it is the main subject, always messes up a story. And I was already confused with all the gods that were nothing more than angels with over inflated egos that anyone could capture and kill, the assassin that turned into mother-do-good, the boy demon who thought John Anchor was his father and that little child that is older and more powerful than him... so all this became very jumbled. No wonder a lot of the threads just remained hanging. What happened to Devon? Who the hell was the little girl? What did Carnival do? Everything just got negated by a race towards the beginning of time, when Ayen blocked the gates of Heaven. And then poof! A lot of fast scan scenes and the book ended. The fight never took place, or if it did, it was never described. And don't worry, if you preferred any other ending, there must be a broken timeline floating like a disolving icecube in a water glass that you can climb on and enjoy whatever reality you desire.

This book must be one of the most (if not THE most) WTF book I have ever read. In the end I was pacing, swearing and regretting my lost time. If the Deepgate Codex series would have been a video game, it would have never been released, with all the lack of documentation and obvious bugs.

My conclusion: what a nice beginning with Scar Night, but what a faltering fiasco up to and through God of Clocks. It did manage to make me think of a book where the main character would be Carnival, and all the rest would be just detail. I just loved her character and I feel so unfulfilled because it was never properly developed.

Iron Angel starts where Scar Night left us. Even if the scope of the story now expands tremendously, doing credit to the author's imagination, I didn't feel so good reading it as I did Scar Night. Frankly, I don't know exactly why. It may have to do with the several character groups in the plot, which we follow separately for quite some time and that I know are bound to encounter each other or influence each others destinies. When that fails to happen for a long time, I get nervous. Also, while the description of hell was very nice, I found it difficult to swallow.

That doesn't mean it is not still a brilliant story, just that it seemed to falter a little in the middle. Now, almost close to the end of God of Clocks, I can say that the quality will improve, at least as measured from my own level of pleasure, although it doesn't get close to Scar Night yet.

I love that Alan Campbell really worked on his characters, making them very different to the formulas we are used to see in the field. Heroes are cowardly and impotent, women are strong, gods are flawed and some characters are simply likeable even if they don't see reason and exist for the sole purpose of physical revenge.

I can say that God of Clocks is at least intriguing, although I have to ask myself if the author didn't bite more than he can chew with the new concepts involved. Anyway, that is another post, coming soon on a blog near you.

I was reading this interview of the guy from The Wertzone blog, a Sci-fi and fantasy blog that I enjoy reading, and he recommended some movies and some games and some books. So, on his recommendation, I started reading Scar Night, by Alan Campbell, and I have no reason to regret my decision (other than the one I will not be able to read another technical book until I finish the saga).

The writing style is nice, although I wouldn't say it rocked my world, however the world the author has envisioned is really great. Imagine a large city built upon great chains of alien metal, suspended over hell itself, inhabited by people worshiping a version of the devil, their church defended by angels called archons and armies of assassins. There is more, but you just have to read the book. What I also enjoyed tremendously is that the characters are very different from one another, ranging from mad scientists to priests corrupted by their desire for the greater good, from good hearted assassins to undead gods and inept cowardly angels.

I can only recommend you read this book, the first from the Deepgate Codex trilogy. Funny enough, the writer, Alan Campbell, was one of the authors of the Grand Theft Auto game, so he is also a software developer. I am hooked.

Did I mention I love how this guy writes?

Ugh! The fifth book of the Revelation Space series , The Prefect, is the worst so far. Not only is it standalone, but it is also a prequel, something that happends pre-plague. All the characters seem to have been lobotomized some time in the past (possibly in an operation that also mixed their brains around so that they all sound and act the same), including the bad guys, and the story is completely boring. Nothing in this novel makes any sense, nor does it make you feel anything special, quite the contrary, the scenes that were supposed to bring out feelings for the reader felt really forced and had the opposite effect.

The only good thing in the book was the ClockMaker, all 10 pages of it or whatever. Couldn't you start with the ClockMaker, continue with the ClockMaker and end with the ClockMaker and forget all about the stupid and randomly emotional people, mr Reynolds?

The fourth book by Alastair Reynolds that I've read recently, also set in the Revelation Space world, Absolution Gap follows the adventures of the ship Nostalgia for Infinity as it flees the "culling" of the Delta Pavonis star system by the swarm like machines called the Inhibitors. There is no purpose in reading the book without the others, as the story starts where it had left and continues to a more or less open ending.

This felt like the best book so far, however the enjoyment that I got from it had its very brutal ups and downs. While the beginning starts with full force and made me want to not let go of the book until I finish it, there was a side story that seemed not to have any connection with the main arc. When they finally met, they left me with that "What the fuck?" feeling. The ending was a jiggly up and down ranging from very cool and completely dumb. Not that the writing style faltered, but the behaviour of some of the characters really annoyed the crap out of me.

I would have to say that the ending was the most anticlimactic of all the books in the series, but the book is definitely the best yet.

Count Zero is the middle volume of the Sprawl trilogy written by William Gibson, which includes Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, all of them very good books and set in the same universe as the short stories Johnny Mnemonic, New Rose Hotel and Burning Chrome.

I had read this book when I was a child and I loved it a lot. Circumstances moved me towards reading it again and I am glad they did. In my youth I had barely understood it and I can't say I did a lot better now either; that's because Gibson is one of the mature writers, writing for the mind and heart of adults.

Count Zero in particular, it felt like something one must feel through bones, must sip the content like a good coffee and digest the content with one's soul. Alas, I am not that kind of a guy, so I read it fast in the subway while going to work, in big gulps, like the glutton I am. I highly recommend the former approach ;)

The plot itself is like a high tech detective story, but it is almost irrelevant. Gibson has such a clear and powerful vision of the future, that it subjugates all of its characters to it and makes it, the future, the main character. Many things are not said, but left to be understood, like the reasons while the world is the way it is and why people act the way they do. Read Count Zero, even if you are not a sci-fi reader, because beyond the storyline there are layers upon layers of worldliness and it is a great book.

As I was saying in the last posts about the Revelation Space books by Alastair Reynolds, the guy has a problem with his own personality bleeding into the one of his characters. However, as the second book was better than the first, so the third one, Redemption Ark, seemed to be better than the second. It may be because now the main focus is on the Conjoiners, the fabled human faction that gave the star drives, facing the threat of the Inhibitors. Also, a very promising explanation of where they got the idea from in the first place.

We are seeing a lot of old characters from the previous books in this third installment, which bothered me a little because they weren't really needed, but it's not too annoying. Also, some of the awesome technological feats in the book are only partially explained and sometimes even completely ignored and left to a vague description, like "distant lights" when referring to a Hell weapons vs Inhibitors battle. But the focus, as always, was more on the human interaction than on the technical part, although there was blessingly more tech than in the first two books.

Since I've finished the book while away from home, I started reading another book, not the fourth in the series, so you will probably have to wait a while longer before I review that, but rest assured, I fully intend to read the entire saga.

Chasm City is the second book from the Revelation Space series written by Alastair Reynolds. It is set in the same universe, give a few hundred years, and it felt to me as a better, more mature book than Revelation Space. However, truth be told, the ending had the same flaw: the personality of the author bled through all the characters, transforming them into a do-good Scooby Doo gang, eager to solve mysteries and help people. Sorry, Mr. Reynolds, you're just too nice of a person! :)

Anyway, this time the plot revolves around issues of personal goals and identity, the very definition of a persona and of quality of life. While the story is intricate enough to make it a great book, I thought many of the concepts in it were very interesting, but insufficiently explored. Then again, explore any concept long enough and you never get to the other end, so at least having a complete coherent story that spans the entire plot is a big plus.

I just started Redemption Ark, the third book, which (finally! :) ) deals with the Conjoiners and a technologically advanced alien race. Or at least it starts that way. Happy reading!

I had not read a scifi book in quite a while, but then I heard of Alastair Reynolds, once an employee of ESA, and now turned hard sci fi writer. I just had to read something by him and I started with Revelation Space, the first of the Revelation Space universe books, which spans 5 books and several short stories and novellas.

What can I say? I loved the book. Not in a very intellectual way, though. Certainly the universe in which the action takes place is very ingenious and the story full of twists and hi-tech marvels, however, I felt like the writing style was not completely to my liking. The characters are all very much alike, the leaps in logic are pretty big and only to support previous ideas that the book had put forward. It seemed lazy to me. But I did say I loved the book, once I got over the "revelation" that the PhD in Astrophysics and the ESA work did not compel Mr. Reynolds to be very thorough. Besides, it's only the first volume. Maybe the next ones will be more natural, now that a first book has established the rules of the universe.

Prepare to delve in a place where technology is way more advanced than today, but faster than light travel is not yet possible and the lives of people on spaceships, frozen in stasis and moving at relativistic speeds, feel like weeks have passed between a world and another, while for the people on the planets decades or even centuries have passed. Extinct races, time spans of billions of years and impressive armament (both in the physical and virtual realms), favourably offset the fact that humans are pretty much the same and they all sound like Asimov characters :)

Wow! This book is a must read. Not only because it is short, well written and freely available online, but because it does what very few books manage to do lately: actually showing you how to practically apply the knowledge and the consequences of that. Basically, it's like a technical book with a story.

As the title suggests, Scrum and XP from the Trenches is a book about software management, moving step by step through all the requirements of the management process in a Scrum environment and showing in detail what Henrik's actual implementation was, the problems he encountered, the options he had and why he chose one, the other, or a combination thereof. Even if he talks mostly about Scrum, he does mix in the elements of XP that he thought worthy of borrowing, making this not a book on any management theory, but of a real life process.

As previously mentioned, the book is freely available on InfoQ, although you are highly encouraged to buy the book to support Henrik Kniberg and other endeavours like his. A must have for any manager or team lead, and a very good read for any developer, having the chance to glimpse at a real software work environment.

For me I am glad to have read it and to see more of my current job in the book than the previous one, which means I have actually moved upwards and not only horizontally.

Foundations of Programming is a free ebook written by Karl Seguin, a member of the CodeBettter community. As you might have guessed by now from the fact the book is free, he is Canadian. :)

There is even a Foundation of Programming site, where there are a lot of free resources on programming as well as other free ebooks.

About the book, it is a good read. A bit inconsistent, it seemed, since it starts with chapters on Domain Driven Design, Persistence, Dependency Injection, Unit Testing, then moves to Object Relational Mappers and then has three "Back to Basics" chapters about Memory, Exceptions and Proxies. There is a logic to this, but the jump from expert to junior programming and then back again was a little annoying.

Interestingly enough, Karl Seguin is a former Microsoft MVP that advocates ALT.Net.

Bottom line, it is a good and easy read for all levels of programming. People might be attracted to the way Karl is expressing his opinion without actually being biased towards any of the usual debate parties. Beginners might learn about the foundations of the stuff they take for granted, like heap/stack, while more advanced developers can start thinking about structured ways of doing work, like DDD and automated unit testing. Neither chapter is a complete new revelation, but taken together, they do present a clear picture of programming from Karl Seguin's perspective and can surprise you on matters you thought you had complete control over.

WPF Unleashed is a 2006 book in the Unleashed series about the new Microsoft paradigm on visual interaction, written by Adam Nathan. Windows Presentation Foundation is now the default Windows graphics framework, overriding Windows Forms, and it is based on XAML, which is used in Windows desktop applications, Silverlight applications, directly in Internet Explorer and even as a document template.

The book is nicely written, covering all the main characteristics of WPF, the functionality, the problems and tips on stuff that is not so clear. It also contains "Digging deeper" sections where some of the works "under the hood" are revealed. The book focuses more on the XAML implementation (the declarative part) rather that the code one, and I was happy to see that the code was written in C#.

All in all I liked the book and I wish I had more time to parse it completely. So far I've read the basic stuff (without the fancy graphics) so the first 10 chapters and I will wait for a moment of respite so I can detail some of the stuff I found in the book and how to implement them.

A while ago I was writing about the novel Infected, a sci-fi thriller written by Scott Sigler. In it, an automated alien probe was using biological reconstruction to create a portal for unspeakable (and not described) evil that awaited on the other side. Alien probes being as they are, the operation failed, but not permanently, since the probe remained undiscovered and ready to plan more mayhem.

Enter Contagious, Sigler's latest book, also freely available in weekly installments on his personal blog in both MP3 and PDF versions. Is the guy too nice or what? Today the final episode was released and I can finally comment on the book.

It is clearly a better book than Infected. Not by too much, but definitely more intense. It's like Aliens to the Alien film, only for Infected :) The probe is logically doing all kind of stupid stuff, including duplicating part of his functionality in the brain of a little girl. I mean, we humans have enough trouble as it is with girls, be them small or grown up, albeit the alien probe had no idea I suppose. The US centric approach was kept, there are more explosions, lots of killing, contagious yet centralised alien organisms... in other words, a decent sequel. The only thing I couldn't really get is the father-son relationship between Perry and Dew. Couldn't believe that for a moment, although it may be my fault.

All in all I read all chapters with pleasure, anxiously waiting for the next episode. It would make a nice manga :) I can only thank mr. Sigler for allowing me to read his book without feeling like a thief getting it through a file sharing service.

So, is humanity doomed in this one? Well, yeah... I mean, we still have girls... and besides, I can't possible spoil the ending now, can I? Rest assured that there will be a third book and our favourite aliens may still get rid of the human infestation and bring the love of God on our planet. Hmm, why did I say that? My tongue feels funny, too.