La Tinaja

Books

• Lionel Casson. Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971.

  A good reference work for understanding a broad overview of ship and boat designs as they evolved in the ancient Mediterranean world (and persisted into the medieval). Casson is a classicist rather than a maritime historian, so the material is very much oriented towards reading and interpreting texts over detailed analysis of the technical aspects of ship designs, but this skill set is far more important for pulling data and inference out of the limited sources. Given the limited sources available, it would not seem possible to have a work on Mediterranean antiquity similar to that I read by Ferreiro recently.

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• Thomas Fuchs. Retinafy Your Web Sites & Apps. Philadelphia, PA: Thomas Fuchs, 2012.

  I bought this self-published e-book when it came out in 2012, but a recent revised edition encouraged me to revisit it to see what more I might get out of it now that so much of this has become second nature. Still a good reference resource.

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• Adharanand Finn. Running with the Kenyans: Passion, Adventure, and the Secrets of the Fastest People on Earth. New YorK: Ballantine Books, 2012.

  Entertaining memoir of a British runner who moved to Kenya to train with Kenyan marathon runners. Provides interesting insight into the different approaches to conditioning, nutrition, and training regimes employed by Kenyan athletes and their coaches as well as the role athletics plays in contemporary Kenyan culture generally. Does a better job of avoiding the temptation to declare a single, magical explanation for recent Kenyan successes in long-distance running than I had expected.

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• Scott Rosenberg. Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.
  • Scott Rosenberg takes his opportunity to observe Mitch Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation in its (frustrated) development of the failed Chandler personal information manager software package to explore the myriad problems that contribute to developing software. The play-by-play of Chandler development itself is interesting, but Rosenberg’s work historicizing against the backdrop of the evolution of project management and the computer sciences over the second half of the twentieth century provides incredibly valuable context and is incredibly well-done popular history writing.
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• David L. Craddock. Dungeon Hacks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games. Canton, OH: Press Start Press, 2015.

  Craddock selects several representative early Roguelikes (NetHack, Moria, Angband, etc.) and relates the circumstances of their development and the design motivations of their several creators. The focus very much favors constructing a unified narrative out of interviews with the creators of the games. What analytical perspective there is oriented much more towards issues of game design than to historical perspective. One notable exception comes in his presentation of the independent (and to some degree simultaneous) development of Beneath Apple Manor, Sword of Fargoal, and Rogue—three games with similar design goals and mechanics, though only Rogue would become the namesake for the genre.

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