Eric Knipp

I recently finished reading a couple of books I’ve been chewing on for a while. As a full-time Gartner analyst and part-time MBA student, I don’t get a lot of time to read apart from my discipline, but I managed to squeeze in The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeeth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern as well as an interesting book that hits closer to my day job, Dot.Cloud: The 21st Century Business Platform. As an added bonus, I’m throwing in a short discussion of Enterprise Web 2.0 with EGL.

The Unfinished Game

I’ve got a dirty secret – I’m mathematically challenged, and it has always been so. I’ve had to work extra hard to be extra average at math. Secretly, I’d like to be good at math, and understand some of the advanced compression, encryption, and other algorithms that kick around the interwebs. Every now and then, I’ll pick up a math-oriented book, and I usually put it down in despair. Not so The Unfinished Game, which is as much about history as it is about probability.

In a nutshell, the book describes a snail mail conversation – an ancient form of collaboartion – between Pascal and Fermat regarding the correct way to devise the payment of a wager on an unfinished game of dice. The narrative weaves mathematical explanations between discussion of the time, place, and personalities of the story. A quick and compelling read, you’ll come out of it feeling that you’ve learned something truly important, borne of a discovery that took ages by modern standards. It is striking to consider how quickly we are able to use the social Web to iterate over interestin ideas,  in comparison to the pen and paper ways of old. Strongly recommended (4/5).

Dot Cloud

Peter Fingar’s book describes his visionary view of the forces leading to a Cloudy future. Fingar is a noted author of business strategy books, and Dot.Cloud is no exception. Rather than describe in exhaustive detail the technological underpinnings of the Cloud, Fingar provides actionable advice, compelling examples, and inspiring stories as he pontificates on the “21st century business platform”. The book is really eight discrete essays, and each explores another aspect of business in the Cloud. There is a heavy emphasis on BPM and end-user interaction and collaboration using technology tools. I highly recommend this important book, especially if your knowledge about the Cloud’s business implications is a bit cloudy (5/5).

Enterprise Web 2.0 with EGL

IBM’s EGL is a business-oriented language and deployment tool for the development of Web 2.0 Ajax applications that span several platforms including mainframes/iSeries (COBOL), Java EE, and the browser (JavaScript). It is especially well-suited for enterprises with heavy legacy investments that they want to resurface with Web 2.0 instead of replacing those assets or spending a lot of time building a SOA strategy. The book is an easy read – especially if you skim the language syntax examples – and illustrates that IBM’s engineers put a lot of thought into the design of EGL. It’s worth reading even if you don’t plan to use EGL in your enterprise, because it has content geared both at programmers and managers who need to understand the platform, and also because EGL provides an interesting thought experiment. There aren’t many examples of languages/compilation tools that take one high-level syntax and compile down to several other high-level languages. While you probably don’t need to read this if you are outside the IT modernization space, it is interesting nonetheless, and the conversational tone makes it easy to get through. The first couple chapters in particular are well worth a read for any IT professional as they provide a great introduction to the role of IT in competitive strategy (for non-technology firms) and to the subject of Web 2.0. Recommended (3/5).

In the Batter’s Circle

I’ve just started reading Michael Ogrinz’s Mashup Patterns, and Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny is in the warmup area.

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Category: book reviews     Tags: books

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