WirelessDoc

Bookshelf: Python and Tobias Wolff

I picked up Beginning Python by Norton, Samuel, Aitel et al, and Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff on my way to the train to New Jersey to visit my sister for dinner.

There's a pretty good Borders Books right near Penn Station, and even though it's only a 45-minute ride to New Brunswick via New Jersey Transit, my reflex is to pick up some new reading material.

The Python is book is for my transition from the Microsoft world of Visual Basic to a much larger universe of open source scripting. I made this decision a while back, and it's just coincidental that the Google App Engine requires Python.

Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins is a collection of ten new short stories along with 21 classics. I vaguely recall reading a biography of Hemingway that gave his list of best short story writers. It included de Maupassant, Chekhov, Tolstoy and others. Wolff is on my list.

You can listen to T. Coraghessan Boyle reading Wolff’s short story “Bullet in the Brain” (scroll down to the "ONE WITH A BULLET" podcast) in a podcast that's part of The New Yorker series. There's also a brief discussion at the end of the reading.

Digital lifestyle: Amazon.com to Acquire Audible.com

From the Amazon PR Release:

"Audible.com offers the best customer experience, the widest content selection and the broadest device compatibility in the industry," said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com's senior vice president for worldwide digital media. "Working together, we can introduce more innovations and bring this format to an even wider audience."

They also plug the out of stock Kindle in the press release.

I've been using audiobooks to listen to John M. Barry's The Great Influenza (unabridged, just over 19 hours), Ian McEwan's Atonement, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things. It was a little difficult with Gibson's work because he's invents new cyberwords and sometimes writes in sentence fragments which makes comprehension difficult. I chose to download the ebook of Cormac McCarthy's The Road for this reason.

The good thing about audiobooks is that you can listen while during your entire commute without interruption, and it's great for a long walk in the city. The really bad thing is that you can't bookmark or navigate to a specific chapter. This works for fiction, but for a science book that you want to use for future reference, it's a real pain.

Mobipocket is great for reading ebooks on your smartphone. You can annotate, bookmark, even draw pictures with their free reader. I've even put chapters of Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment 2008 on my Treo 700p using the desktop Mobipocket software. You lose the illustrations, charts and graphs, but having the text on hand that you can bookmark works for me. It also loads the texts onto the SD card, so can carry many books without clogging up the phone's internal memory.

Alan Teh, aka PalmDoc, reviews the new iSilo 5 software

This is the ebook I tried quite a while ago. I've been using MobiPocket and eReader, but iSilo has plenty of medical reference material.

What I would like to see is something more integrated with all the other apps I use.

The Palmdoc Chronicles » Blog Archive » iSilo 5 has been released

Technorati Tags: Alan Teh, PalmDoc, iSilo, Mobipocket, ereader. PDA, palm

Book list: must-reads for tech pros

This is the latest list of books from CIO Insight that they consider essential for the IT wonk manager.
Slideshow: 15 Must-Reads for Tech Pros

It includes Weinberger's "Everything Is Miscellaneous," and Seth's "The Dip," people with whom I bump heads every now and then.