“A nice book for browsing – 100 chapters of inventions that ‘changed the web.’ Some are unexpected and fascinating – the Mundamen, The Blair Witch Project, Xanadu, Drudge – and others are obvious: markup languages, Apache, micro-blogging, etc. Each chapter is a 1-2 minute read. I read them five at a…”
“This is a good and necessary book, but I can’t figure out how to handle it. There’s simply a lot of information in it, and it’s all so good, that it prompts anxiety in the reader as to how they can possible remember/process it all. The book is exactly what the title says: 100 short vignettes about…”
“ Enjoyable bio of Paul Otlet. Covers the intersection between his desire to index information, and his belief that this would promote world peace. He was a very political librarian, it turns out. ”
“ Hard to review, because it’s 15-years-old, but a nice look back at what CMS was in 2002. It drifts a lot – talks about governance, content strategy, and design – but perhaps that’s how ‘content management’ was perceived back then? ”
“An absolutely magisterial work that explores every last corner of the CSS spec. The advancements that have come along since I learned CSS are amazing – you can almost write executable code in CSS now. This book explores every edge case, no matter absurd, to probe every last corner of the spec. I…”
“I’m rating this 5-starts merely for the level of effort that went into it. That doesn’t mean I understood it all. This is the look at all the ways people design software that handle large volumes of data. Things like replication, partitioning, indexing, etc. And it doesn’t just described them – it…”
“This book offers up the premise that the Internet has enabled new methods of original research (new ‘digital methods’) that didn’t exist before. Things like link analysis, search engine indexing analysis, and site crawling analysis. Some of it is interesting, like an extended comparison of the…”
“This is really a collection of writings, published elsewhere, about Vannevar Bush’s seminal 1945 essay ‘How We May Think,’ and the idea of the Memex which he proposed. I suspect everyone who reads this book will enjoy it, because you have to be pretty interested in Bush to even want to read this….”
“This is a polemic to interoperability. Doctorow explains why manufacturers made their products resistant to repair, resistant to integration, and complicated to change. He explains the business rationale behind it all, and some of the really dirty tricks that companies have used to make it a crime…”
“I started reading this all the way through, but – like most ‘Cookbook’ titles – it gets increasingly esoteric later on. Still, a very good book which helps you get a grasp on jQuery through considerable examples. Many examples are incredibly basic, which means the books functions well as an…”
“This is a solid overview of React. Good examples, but like most coding books, they get long. Also, ‘React’ isn’t just one thing – it’s an entire stack of technologies that work together, and this book seems to cover them all. Well-written, clear. (I find technical books hard to assign star ratings…”
“This is a comprehensive and primer review of RDF. I don’t know if ‘linked data’ is a specific term, but in this book, it’s RDF, and not just ‘casual’ RDF. It’s not just embedded metadata – this is a hardcore look at creating what are essentially distributed databases based on RDF data. Not for the…”
“This is the story of a journalist’s experience with LambdaMOO , which was the original ‘chat room’ of the early 1990s. A couple definitions – A ‘MUD’ was a ‘Multi-User Dungeon,’ which was originally game-ish environment where you could move through a virtual space, described via text only. A ‘MOO’…”
“I tried to understand this, but it went so, so far over my head. I’ve been working on the web for 25 years. I have a minor in philosophy. Neither of those things helped. I got about halfway through it before giving up. It’s dense , man. I feel badly for not sticking it out, but at the end, I was…”
“ If you’re a developer and you just never ‘got’ Drupal, this is your book. If this book succeeds at one thing, it’s to change your mindset about Drupal – to understand the different paradigms you need to adopt to work with it. Highly recommended in that sense. ”
“ This wasn’t for me. I missed the word ‘beginner’ in the subtitle. There are chapters explaining the basics of HTTP. And of programming in general. Also, it’s full of cutesy drawings and…stuff. This is good book for the right audience. I just wasn’t it. ”
“I read this for historic context. At 13 years old, it’s not relevant, but it does reveal that managing files was really was CMS did back then. Most of the book is about how to manage files without overwriting people (the ‘collaborative approach’). This was written by the founder of Interwoven, and…”