Some of these were written a while back. When I find time I add books I read recently. My wife and I can wander into a book store or stop by Amazon and drop 300 dollars on books without batting an eye and have them all read in a matter of weeks. I am always looking for stuff to read. You see what I am interested. If you are feeling brave give one a try. Otherwise send me a recommondation. I will read anything. I kid my wife about her Romance Novels but if she leaves one on teh coffee table and I am sitting on the couch I will pick it up and read it. Send me suggestions at Jerome Jahnke.

• Patterns Pat Cadigan is a cool woman. She writes some great Cyberpunk. Not just good but great, right up there with William Gibson. But that is not what is cool about her. She wrote one of my all time favorite short stories "The Power and the Passion" the story starts with the underlying assumption that to kill something that looks like a person and get good at it you must be a twisted and sadistic fuck. Even if you don't like the rest of the book that story alone is worth the price.
• Expendable, Commitment Hour, Vigilant, Hunted, and Ascending I read Expendable based on the blurb, I flew through the book it was great. It is kinda Dilbertain really, competent people are given really shitty task. They succeed and are given a secret promotion and more shitty tasks. This is the theme really of the books the heroine remains an underdog throughout. Commitment Hour isn't technically part of the series, but stands well on it's own. Anyway, I enjoyed these books mainly becuase no matter how fucked up my work situation can be Festina Ramos has me beat all to hell. Normally she has one group of people trying to kill her and then her bosses wish she was dead as well, they are all great romps. If you are a fan of the Harry Harrison Stainless Steel Rate books, but think that stuff is a just a bit over the top you will like these. They move at the same pace, but while Slippery Jim is one step ahead of everyone, Festina Ramos is half a step behind. She is competent but in a universe were everything wants her dead and she manages to survive nonetheless.
• Internet Telephony: Call Processing Protocols How does SIP work? How about H.323 or MGCP? Well this book'll tell ya. I can read an RFC with the best of them, but they are dry and boring, and well some times ambigious. The nice thing about books like these is that they provide an interpretation of what the RFC is all about. So when you run into an ambigious point in an RFC you have an outside opinion. One thing I learned watching VoiceXML in the W3C is that it is VERY hard to be explicit describing anything, and that no matter how clear you think something is some large number of people will be able to interpret it in exactly the wrong way. On the upsdie I now have a SIP Softphone that works on my FreeBSD machine.
• Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life David Friedman is a smart guy. He teaches economics, you gotta be kinda smart to do that, trust me. Anyway, this is a nice book which attempts, and does a real good job, of explaining economic principles in a way anyone with high school math can explain. I enjoyed it. As time marches on I am thinking about working for myself. One of the things I know about businesses is that a common cause of failure in businesses is the owners inability to price his/her own products and services. While this book does not address that answer specfically it does give me framework for deciding how to price things. It is also just a facinating read, I know a a buncha math but economics has as much to do with people as it does math.
• Death is a Lonely Business I am a huge fan of Ray Bradbury. I mean huge, the man writes wonderful stories that are unique to my experience. I find that short stories are the best kind of fiction, not becuase they are quick but becuase the enforce a brevity of expression. Bradbury is a master, even his novels are strung together short stories. This book is almost an exception to this rule. The main character is a writer in a run down Venice Beach who is some how at the center of a large number of murders. The lead is clearly Bradbury, and the book is filled with experiences which become well knonwn Bradbury stories.
• The Packer Way Ron Wolf took my team (and it is my team, our family has owned stock since the 50's) and turned it from a prenial loser, and the NFL's equivelant of a Siberaian Gulag, and turned it into one of the elite teams in the NFL. He struck while the iron was hot and wrote a book about how he did it. It has been an interesting read, and like most good business books you walk away with the feeling that it was all commons sense. Basically, he says this, find a job you can do without interference from your supervisors, hire great people and give them the ability to perform. This doesn't explain why he hired and then fired Ray Rhodes this past year though.
• Introductory Graph Theory Believe it or not the U of C wants to make undergraduate education more fun. They are contemplating doing away with the core and increasing the student teacher ratio. When you study computer science there mathematial rigor and theory rule. There is a specfic data structure called a graph. I knew about them before studying them. But the act of taking a somewhat rigorous look at them revealed to me what has been obvious to other CS professionals for years, there is power in them there trees. Gary Chartrand, does a nice job of describing a powerful math in a less threatening and more informal way in this book really written befor computer science really grabbed hold of graphs to make them their own.
• Extreme Programming Explained Kent Beck writes another one of those, everyone is doing their work this way, so this is the methodology they are using kinda books. Basically programmers are a lazy lot, we steal as much code from other people and other places as we can and pawn it off as our original work. He has some other neat ideas, but in general when management asks what programming methodology we use we can point to this book as proof positive that what we have been doing for years is good e damn nough, after all there is a book about it.
• Fundementals of Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition Eric Keller edits this good basic tretis of the field of computer speech. Technically I don't trudge this one becuase my day job consists of developing a browser in Java, and if you need a book for Java you are working with technolgy that is too old. But it is giving me a good background for how recognition and done. And given my wifes vision disability it is letting me think more about how our browser could be used for the disabled.
• Noir K. W. Jeeter is my generations Philip K. Dick, while Hollywood has done it's best to turn Philip K. Dick into just another writer, K. W. Jeeter has taken up the baton and written a number of great books in what coul d be best described as psychodelic science fiction. The hallmark of PKD was that you were never sure what was real and what was not real, Blade Runner, PKD's most famous expression, is this way, in the story you keep running into clues that Deckart is a Replicant. This book takes this one step further, the hero of our story has something implanted in his eyes tha makes everything he sees seem like a 1950's Sam Spade detective movie. So this filter provides another nice jumping off point for reality, another book in the vein of Dr. Adder, but I will never understand what the facination is with Jeeter and Prince Charles rather singular comment to Wassername Bowles, about climbing up inside of her. Get the Dr. Adder books, they spend a great deal of time on them in there.
• Diamond Age Neal Stephenson writes another great book, this one is set a generation or so after Snow Crash, we have moved from the virtual world into the nanotech world. The burb claves are transformed into much larger and more powerful clans and one clan is worried it's children are stagnating. So they device a "book" that helps to keep them from being too conformist. A great place to start a book, and it was an exciting read, the ways some technology ws worked around I enjoyed a great deal (they hire actors "ractors" to deal with human timing and emotion in text to speech, although they have great speech regonition, go figgure.) The only thing that annoyed me about this book was that it took place over nearly 15 years, and one character was "missing" for about 8, but when he came out all his little electronics were still state of the art and working in the world wide net, as someoen who works with technology on a daily basis I found it hard to swallow.
• Reading People People fascinate me, why they do things and more importantly how they do things really gets me thinking. I have for a long time been interested in what is called Mentalism, it is a type of magic that uses our own inate predictabilites to fool us into thinking something magical happened. Jo-Ellan Dimitrius is a jury consultant, on her hunches people like OJ and Richad Ramiraz bet their lives and freedoms. I am finding this a fascinating read.
• Never Be Lied To Again You may notice a trend here, but of late some serious thought has been going into what directions my career might take, some of thoughts steer me towards management. David Leiberman has a real fast style, I tore though this book as fast as I have some fiction. Much of it was obvious though. Since I have had this interest in Mentalism it seems to me much of what Leiberman had to say was covered by books I had read on that topic.
• Machine Beauty David Gelernter, my buddy Colin Davis loaned me this book. It is kinda fluff reading, but it is about beauty and the computers we use. David also has a great book I read years ago called "Mirror Worlds" which is about a future with a 1 to 1 correspondece between real life and virtual life. He also has the dubios distinction of recieving a package from Ted Kaczynski.
• The Fermi Solution The more I hear about Fermi the more I regret not being able to have met the man (our generations never really crossed.) Fermi admitted to knowing only the 4 differential equations required for modern physics, his genius was knowing which of the four applied to any given situation. Hans Christian von Baeyer writes a series of essays on the beauty of science.
• Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy Robert Jourdain, a high level look at what music is and how it effects us. Jourdain pulls research from biology, cognitive psychology, musicology, and philosopy for a neat overview of the cognition of music.
• Phacodynamics: Mastering the tools and techniques of phacoemulsification surgery 2nd ed. Barry S. Seibel, since I am writing just such a simulator it made sense to read a book about it. Learned more than I really wanted to about it though.