La Tinaja

Books

• Nathaniel Popper. Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money. New York: Harper, 2015.

  Listened to this as an audiobook over an incredibly long time in small, disjointed pieces, so I am not certain that I have the most fair impression of it. Some interesting detail here and there on early Bitcoin ventures, but a lot on the Silk Road felt like it had been done elsewhere and in general it felt like there was a lack of much analytical value. Helpful as a descriptive timeline for readers looking for that detail, but my impression was that wasn’t much of a point of view here.

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• J. Michael Orenduff. The Pot Thief Who Studied Einstein. The Pot Thief Mysteries, no. 3. New York: Open Road, 2011.

  The third installment in this light, easy-reading cozy mystery series. More of the same, really, but I continue to enjoy the Albuquerque setting while reading from Berlin.

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• Phil Sturgeon. Build APIs You Won’t Hate: Everyone and Their Dog Wants an API, So You Should Probably Learn How to Build Them. Self-published, 2015.

  The earlier chapters of this book focus more on design and theory and were very helpful for someone coming to API design without a lot of confidence that they even know the right questions to ask. Just having read these three or four early chapters would have been sufficient for me to be more comfortable venturing off on my own. The demonstration code in the more practically-oriented ermainder of the book is in PHP and assumes some of the author’s own libraries for which there are not necessarily ready equivalents in other languages, but it is nonetheless clearly written enough that it should be helpful demonstration for any reader.

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• Warren Ellis. Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street. New York: DC Comics, 2009.

  I have read so much other Warren Ellis and have never read his most famous series. This first volume was a blast and coincidentally fell nicely in line with my accidental streak of reading late 80s and 90s stuff counter culture and hacker culture stuff recently. Interesting unexpected resonances with today’s media and political climate two decades later.

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• John Sandford. The Empress File. New York: Berkley Books, 1991.

  The second installment in a late 80s and early 90s thriller series about a computer penetration specialist and painter, this time running a con on a political cabal in a small Southern city. More tightly written than the first one, but there was less emphasis on the computer exploits that provided some of the nostalgic interest of the first one.

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