I’ve been too busy this week to form a proper blog post, so instead I thought I’d mention some good content I’ve consumed.

Functions + Messages + Concurrency = Erlang : Joe Armstrong

This talk from Joe Armstrong (author of Programming Erlang) gives a really clear breakdown of the reasons concurrent languages (like Erlang) are becoming more important as processors gain more cores. The following quite gives good flavour:

Due to hardware changes:

• Each year your sequential programs will go slower
• Each year your concurrent programs will go faster

Although Joe focuses on Erlang, this applies to all languages tackling concurrency (Scala, F# etc…), thoroughly recommended to developers wanting to know more.

McMafia, Seriously Organised Crime : Misha Glenny

This book has nothing to do with programming (directly), and it may appear at first glance to be some sort of “aren’t gangsters cool” book for macho teenagers. Far from it.

Misha Glenny has been a BBC correspondent covering eastern Europe’s wars, politics and then crime (if you’ve ever heard or read his reports and articles you’ll know he’s a very clued up chap). This interest lead him to investigate organised crime around the world. The resulting book is unbelievable (in the literal sense), it reveals how deeply organised crime is intertwined with our day-to-day lives.

The entire book is fascinating, and highlights they way organised crime can eventually gain so much power it becomes a part of the establishment and has influence over global politics (not just as an issue but as an instigator). It literally effects the lives of everyone on the planet.

Perhaps one of the areas that gets the least coverage is “digital crime”. This is not due to it’s insignificance, quite the reverse. It is huge and vastly profitable, the problem seems to be that researching it is almost impossible. Police forces simply don’t have the funding and resources to gain enough understanding of the way the cyber criminals operate. It’s a subject I’d love to know more about, and one that I’m sure will become more and more important over the coming years.

I can’t recomend it highly enough.

Code Complete 2 : Steve McConnell

People have been banging on about this book for ages, so I caved in and started reading it (especially as I found it in the work bookshelf, saving me 30 quid).

I’m only 1/3 in but it already lives up to the hype. Clear, humorous and very well written. One misconception I had was that it is a straight manual to writing code. In many ways it is, but it goes much further into the thinking processes developers use. It highlights familiar problems and explains the solutions in a way that “just works”.

Basically, if you heard about it and thought it might be worth a read: it is. Read it sooner rather than later, two chapters in I felt like I understood my trade better and that I was on the right track.