I recently got the opportunity to take a look at Learning Heroku Postgres, a new book by Patrick Espake that seems intended to help new PostgreSQL database administrators get their data into the cloud. The chapters are short, concise, and the questionnaires at the end are a nice touch. But does it hit the mark? Almost.
I don’t believe I’ve read anything by Iain M. Banks before, and after Consider Phlebas, I’m not sure I want to.
Now, this isn’t a matter of a terrible novel that made my eyes bleed, or some horrible techniques that drove me insane. I’m not even sure Mr. Banks writes books like this as a matter of course, or simply in a study on methods to cripplingly depress his readers. The worst part of this is that it’s very well written and highly engaging. It’s just… so revoltingly hopeless from approximately every aspect, I’m certain this book has lead to the suicide of at least one person.
Once again, I’ve spent another few days with David Weber reading Field of Dishonor and regardless of how the series continues, I think he’s finally come up with something truly great.
I fully understand the series is supposed to be a space opera–the painstaking descriptions of galactic fleets, impeller drives, and relativistic weapons reinforces that point admirably–but there was precious little of that here. This time, it’s all an exclusive font of character building, and the Harrington universe is much stronger than if Honor had simply defeated another immanent naval threat.
I just finished Gust Front by John Ringo, and Ringo is a hard man to understand. He clearly loves the SciFi genre, and with the continuation of the Posleen War, proves he can delve into the stickier details many gloss over.
The problem is he goes way too far on occasion, detailing for pages on very intricate and specific troop movements and justification. I felt like I was reading a historical account of each battle. Provided a map of the United States, I could probably have replayed each flank and counter-attack exactly as if executing a play-by-play of an Axis and Allies or Risk game. It was mind numbing, and I found myself skimming over vast swaths of copious minutiae. It’s fairly obvious why this, the second in the series, was over 250 pages longer than the first.
I originally wanted to take it easy this Saturday and failed miserably. I started the day off by seeing Shutter Island at the theater two miles from my apartment; it’s an awfully convenient jaunt down the road, and I actually woke up early enough to catch the first matinee. One thing I can say about this film, was that it actually had me second-guessing myself for its entirety.