I'll keep this post short. I read this book to prepare myself for iPhone development and give me a deeper understanding of Objective C. This book is probably the best book to start learning Cocoa Programming currently on the market. It gives chapter by chapter examples with exercises to follow along with. The only shortcoming of the book is that it's a bit dated to what the current xCode version is. A few of the examples might take the novice for a spin (which means it took me for a spin, sometimes a quite frustrating spin) because the step by step instructions are not exactly correct due to the fact some of the menu items have changed or been rearranged. Outside of a few minor issues, like the one I mentioned earlier, it's a pretty fun book and I would recommend it to other experienced programmers. Hopefully Mr. Hillegass will come out with a newer version.

The list keeps going, it really covers all you need to know for having a strong hold on the basics.

The book itself is darker than what I have come to expect with Sedaris. I believe in the book Naked, he is revealing more of the hardships he encountered in his life, taking a more raw approach, hence the title Naked. Surprisingly, some of the chapters leaving you feeling sad. The title of the book is based off the last chapter where D. Sedaris lives in a nudist colony for a few weeks. My interpretation of this closing chapter is him comparing clothing to personalities. After not wearing clothing for weeks, he could look at fully dressed people and know what their body really looked like, what they were trying to hide physically, and what image they were trying to convey. Realizing, much like personalities clothing portrays a portrait that people want you to see, when in reality the true you is something different.

I read two books that covered the topic of unit testing. The first book was Foundations of Programming (recommended by Scottie H. himself and is free) and the second is Pragmatic Unit Testing In C# with NUnit. Both of them start off with the same old song and dance on how you might have up front costs of introducing unit tests to your code, but the stability these tests provide over the duration of your codes lifetime will cause such dramatic cost savings for the company, it would be foolish not to explore the idea. What a compelling sales pitch, a pitch salesmen, for just about any technology, have used since the beginning of technology in businesses. I'll cut all the used car salesman tactics out and state the most intriguing argument to unit test. It increases code stability and it's easy.

The next question I asked myself: What do I exactly test in the code-base I am working on? In Pragmatic Unit Testing (PUT) they give us an acronym to use in order to answer this question. BICEP.

BICEP, breaks down as such.

Boundary Tests

Inversion Tests

Cross Check Tests

Error Tests

Performance Tests

These are the 5 major aspects one should test, according to PUT and it provides unit testers with a place to start. The next major topic in discussing how to test code is decoupling one piece of code to another. Does your code talk to a middleware? How do you test if middleware is not done creating your service to consume or if middleware is down? In steps NUnit Mocks, NMock2, and DotNetMock. These 3 mock frameworks provide the developer with the ability to feed your tests predefined values, values decided by you. Without going into how to use these mock frameworks, I believe that outside of a few isolated situations they should not be used. The entire purpose of testing your code is to test that you are getting information back that fits the criteria you are looking for. If this information, that is beyond your control, changes on whatever level for whatever reason, you as a developer need to know. Putting in mock objects hides this.

Since I work for a web shop, the topic of web UI unit tests interested me. PUT recommend using Selenium. This makes sense because it still uses the nunit style of testing keeping all your tests to one testing style. Selenium seems a bit cumbersome in comparison to WaitN or iMacro, but I feel keeping all your testing in the same style outweighs the cons of not using Selenium. The more desperate testing sources you introduce, the more confusing it is for an outsider to step in and see the whole picture when learning the code, especially when it's not contained in a single solution.

Finally, I recommend reading both of the books mentioned, but lets be honest most of us care so little about unit testing we'll be lucky to read all of 1 of these books let alone all of both. If this is the case I recommend PUT, while the first few chapters read like the high school teacher striving to gain his students social acceptance, it's an easy read and you can jump into the book at nearly any chapter and get the exact information you are looking for on unit testing. This is something I wish all programming books could achieve.

The Kindle --

My thoughts: I'm sold, I'm in love and if everything keeps on the right pace the Kindle should entirely change the way collegiate educational systems sell books. Jeff Bezos (Amazon's founder), come here and give me hug.

Let's look at the device, then discuss how the Kindle could be one aspect that will push Amazon right through the economic downturn and how the Kindle has the potential to affect the educational system.

The Kindle is an electronic reading device that uses a technology called e-ink. E-ink makes reading an electronic device easy on your eyes. The battery on the Kindle will let it run for two weeks without a charge. It also allows you to download a book nearly anywhere, by using the Sprint PCS network (a possible saving grace for a slowly dying Sprint). On the Kindle one can email pdf's to the device for reading, surf wikipedia, and browse most of their favorite blogs. It also allows you to add annotations to pages, search through entire books (a favorite feature of mine) and with the Kindle 2.0 you can have it read to you.

From a nerd perspective it's the little things. When I'm reading in the morning eating my Coco Puffs, I continually find myself fighting to keep the book open to the page I'm reading. New books always seem to want to shut. With the Kindle, the book is always open and a page turn is one quick button push.  I also appreciate when I'm discussing a book to a friend; I'm able to run a quick search and pull up the exact excerpt from the book.  Finally, when I see a book I want, I download it in little over a minute.   No driving to the book store (assuming they have it in stock), no waiting for the book in the mail and best of all it was considerably cheaper than buying the book new, in most cases half price.

What excites me most are the possibilities for the Kindle. If universities start to adopt the Kindle (UPDATE: After the release of the Kindle DX Jeff B. has announced they will be working with universities as early as this fall), it could be revolutionary. Since most books purchased on the Kindle are half off, the device will pay for itself in two semesters under normal course load, possibly one. Students will not have to carry 3 or 4 books along with a laptop to various classes throughout the day simply a laptop and a Kindle. No more waiting in long lines at the book store. 1 click for each book you want and you're done. Being a grad student and working full time means I have to step out during lunch to get my books, a one click option would be a nice time savings for me.

Examining the Kindle from a financial perspective gives Amazon a positive outlook. Imagine every university adopting the Kindle in the same way every college student adopted iPods. Amazon.com would be the iTunes music store of the book industry. Setting the bar for digital distribution and providing the platform for Amazon to break into the hardware industry.  All these aspects build upon Amazon's core competences while staying with it's strategy of delivering books cheaply and easily. Wallstreet felt the same way I did and Amazon saw a 10 point stock jump when rumors of the new Kindle started to circulate a week before it's release.

Friedman starts the book out discussing the "10 flatteners" of the world and how these flatteners lead to the "triple convergence" (For a brief description of these ideas check Wikipedia). For most of us nerds, the technologies he discusses are nothing new. Using a big picture approach he wraps up these ideas with the triple convergence, provided points of view that, at the very least, will challenge you to think. It’s after he discusses triple convergence when the book really starts to get interesting. Friedman begins to discuss the affects these ideas are having and will have on societies, politics, outsourcing, wealth, schooling, and religion. He covers these ideas quite extensively, so I'll just cover a few of my favorites (which happen to be very touchy topics): politics and religion.

In discussing the effects of the triple convergence, Friedman refers to Karl Marx's manifesto which, in part, says in a purely capitalistic society, there will be no wars over religion or politics because those will affect business. Friedman then looks at how companies with global supply chains in two countries will work together, because, despite their differing political or religious views it will be in their best financial interest to maintain peace, in fear the company's who's supply chain is in their country, might pull out. This in turn causes the country to loose large revenue generators. Losing these generators would cause a loss in funding for schooling, technology, home grown business and the silly religious or political wars they would like to engage. Intriguing concepts...I think so.

For technologists this book should light a fire under your ass. Friedman reiterates how we have lead the race on technology, but as technology is becoming cheaper and other countries are focusing more on education in science and technology, we the American technologists, are not just competing with our fellow American's for a job or for the race to the next big idea. We are now competing with many other countries in the world. This also means we are collaborating with many other countries.

Overall the first half of the book was pretty boring, but as he started into the application of the topics he covers in the first half the book, the book became very interesting. I recommend this book to any techie who is interested in how tech fits in the big picture.