My Books

For having a look on my bibliography, please click here.
i really would like to talk about two of them:

the first book from Tom DeMarco - Deadline i had to read for a course last year. the course was about project management and called 'media engineering'. it was a very interesting course which gave me a lot. the main items where about project management, how to start a project, talking about the different software life-cycles and approaches, doing some cost-estimation and things like that.
the professor told us to read this book as a companion for this course. this book is a novel and deals with a fictional story about a software development team. DeMarco illustrates the principles and outright absurdities that affect the productivity of this team. the main character Mr. Tompkins is hired as the manager for this project. he has to deal with an incredible huge staff of developers and to divide them into groups. there are six different products that have to be produced and he wants to combine this chance of having a lot of people with a kind of test of the different project management principles.
he decides to divide the staff into 18 different teams. that means three groups for every product. but the times are of different sizes and they have to use different methods. they all compete against each other and against an impossible deadline.
at the end of nearly every second or third chapter in this book, Mr. Tompkins writes the most importants things, recently learned, down in a book. those headwords combined with the fictional story that uses real software and management approaches the book offers a lot of very useful and interesting information.
i really enjoyed reading this book, although i dont read many books and sometimes have to force myself.

the second book is a little bit more heavier and needs a lot of cenctration and brain work.
i did a course about programming pictures with processing. this is a very nice tool to produce very nice artworks. the professor recommended many books during this course. books from John Maeda, Joseph Weizenbaum, ... and all those authors that fits into this topic. sometimes he gave us little extracts from certain parts of one book. he did this with this german book 'Sieben Wunder der Informatik' by Juraj Hromkovic. im afraid that this book is just available in german but the translation of the title would be something like 'Seven Miracles of Computer Science'. in its nine chapters the books deals with topics like algorithm, endlessness in an algebraical way, computability, computational complexity theory, coincidence as source of efficiency in algorithm, calculate with DNA molecules and quantum calculator. i know this topics sounds very abhorrent. and they are definetly not easy to understant but Juraj Hromkovic deals with very nice examples. for example he tries to describe the functionality of an algorithm with a recipe of baking a cake. i always had problems to understand all this well-phrased and didactic definitions of those kind of terms. but when i read this extract, the professor gave to us, about algorithm and how to bake a cake i was so excited, surprised and amazed by the manner he explained it. and it was the first time i really understand what a algorithm is and how it works in general.
without paying a lot attention to the price of 21quids, which is quiet a lot for me as a student, i bought this book the same day and i never regreted it.