Book Reading

Preface: During the summer vacation, I messed up the open-source software mirror server of LUG. One of the punishments is to submit reading notes for the books borrowed from the LUG Library. It has been more than two years since I first read this book. It can be said that “The Top of the Wave” opened the door to the IT industry for me. Here, I share my humble opinions with you all.

“The Top of the Wave” has two main lines: one is the rise and fall of technology companies; the other is the regularity of the high-tech industry. The interesting part of this book lies in its first main line, which writes the history of technology companies as fascinating as a novel. The value of this book mainly lies in its second main line, that is, to see the rules through the phenomenon. This article will summarize the rise, glory, and decline of various business empires in “The Top of the Wave”, as well as the development rules of companies and the computer industry.

Here is an old article: reading notes written in June 2012 (original link). These notes were written for my own reference, and they contain many of my own ideas, which may mislead readers. However, the article is too long, and I don’t have time to revise it. Feel free to criticize.

Recently (in the first half of 2012), under the recommendation of Jiahua Guo, I read the book “The Self-Cultivation of Programmers - Linking, Loading, and Libraries” from the LUG library, and I felt like I had found a treasure. However, the final exams are approaching, and I don’t have time to finish the whole book, so I only wrote a part of it.

There are two ways to build software: one is to make it so simple that there are obviously no defects, and the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious defects; the former is much more difficult.

——Hoare in the Turing Award speech “The Emperor’s Old Clothes”

I just finished my makeup exam for the database course. Posting my reading report here to share (and hopefully pass~).

“Seven Databases in Seven Weeks” was published in 2012. It introduces seven of the most popular open-source databases at the time, including a relational database (PostgreSQL), key-value databases (Riak, Redis), a column-oriented database (HBase), document-oriented databases (MongoDB, CouchDB), and a graph database (Neo4j). Except for PostgreSQL, the other six are collectively called NoSQL, meaning they do not use the relational model and do not use SQL as their query language.

The book follows the same format as “Seven Languages in Seven Weeks”: one chapter per database, each chapter divided into three sections called Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. Unlike official database documentation, this book does not simply introduce each technology, but explores the core concepts of each one, helping readers understand the strengths and weaknesses of each database and which database to use for which kinds of requirements.