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reading (catching up)
Jan. 27th, 2013 03:07 pmThe first thing I finished this year was the January 2013 issue of Asimov's. My favorite story this month, hands down, was Suzanne Palmer's "Hotel". I'm a sucker for closed circle mysteries and adventures. This story is a great example of classic setting and plot with a lot of twists and good humor. It's all a bit idea, but to me that makes it charming. I also enjoyed Kit Reed's "The Lend Of Troop 13", in ordinary hides in extraordinary and vice versa. Honorable mention to Nancy Kress' "Mithridates, He Died Old" for referring to Phineas Gage, a fascinating story on its own, which I was already familiar with. I liked Kress' story as well.
I finished a re-read of "The Lord of the Rings". I was amazed to find how much I'd forgotten since I last read it, there is an awful lot going on. The only thing it lacks is kick ass women.
"MySQL Stored Procedure Programming" is a pretty big book, 640 pages in print. It follows the reinforcing format of tell what you're going to tell, tell it, tell it in summary. This is effective in reinforcement, but it does get tiring at times. The first portion of the book covers the basics of stored procedures and function, then goes into some of the details. The second part of the book covers how to interact with stored procedures in the most common languages (PHP, Perl, Java, Python, and .Net C# and VB.net). Each chapter of this section treats one of the languages in detail, with the items covered common in each. The third part of the book covers tuning, optimizing, and best practices. I probably won't use a quarter of what is in this book in respect to my MySQL activities, but much of the practice and advice adapts to any stored procedure programming and many regular programming languages. I really should have taken notes while reading the book because there is too much in it to retain and I really don't want to read it again to get back what I've forgotten. So, if you read it, take notes.
1. Asimov's January 2013
2. J. R. R. Tolkien "The Lord of the Rings"
3. Guy Harrison with Steven Feuerstein "MySQL Stored Procedure Programming"
I finished a re-read of "The Lord of the Rings". I was amazed to find how much I'd forgotten since I last read it, there is an awful lot going on. The only thing it lacks is kick ass women.
"MySQL Stored Procedure Programming" is a pretty big book, 640 pages in print. It follows the reinforcing format of tell what you're going to tell, tell it, tell it in summary. This is effective in reinforcement, but it does get tiring at times. The first portion of the book covers the basics of stored procedures and function, then goes into some of the details. The second part of the book covers how to interact with stored procedures in the most common languages (PHP, Perl, Java, Python, and .Net C# and VB.net). Each chapter of this section treats one of the languages in detail, with the items covered common in each. The third part of the book covers tuning, optimizing, and best practices. I probably won't use a quarter of what is in this book in respect to my MySQL activities, but much of the practice and advice adapts to any stored procedure programming and many regular programming languages. I really should have taken notes while reading the book because there is too much in it to retain and I really don't want to read it again to get back what I've forgotten. So, if you read it, take notes.
1. Asimov's January 2013
2. J. R. R. Tolkien "The Lord of the Rings"
3. Guy Harrison with Steven Feuerstein "MySQL Stored Procedure Programming"
