John Beales

After being held up by a bit of a brick, I’m working on reading the rest of the books that I got for Christmas and just finished Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Blink is a book about first impressions and other split-second thinking that we don’t think we’re doing, and how to get the most value out of those thoughts by understanding how they work, what causes them to be wrong, and what to do about it.

While these fast, subconscious thoughts and decisions happen all day every day in most of our lives, the area of first impressions is a great example of near-instant subconscious thought in action. When we first meet, or even first see or hear, someone our minds take in all kinds of information about that person and we form an opinion of, and often a reaction to, that person. The reaction might be to run if it’s someone brandishing a knife in a dark alley, or to stare if it’s someone really attractive at the beach, or anything in between. Often these reactions are exactly the right reaction, but often they’re not the right reaction at all, and that’s what Blink talks about: Our unconscious thoughts, how they work, how they can work much better than painstakingly working our way through a problem, and what to do to stop them from taking you down completely the wrong path.

Blink is easy to read and very interesting. Extremely interesting. After reading it I hope that I can learn how to make “Thinking without thinking” work in my life, especially now that there’s an election on.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

Here’s the brick book that’s been keeping me from reading some other design & HTML books since Christmas, and I’m finally done! Despite its size, I wanted to read High Performance MySQL from cover to cover as I’ve been working a lot recently with some databases that could stand to go faster, and, while it was a long read, (made longer by taking breaks and reading other books), it was very useful, and will never be too far from my desk, especially when I’m working on server-side code and database design and tuning.

Even before I finished the High Performance MySQL my work was seeing the benefits of what I had learned partway through the book. There are a lot of quirks in MySQL that I wasn’t aware of, especially when it comes to joining tables and applying indexes. In one instance I was able to take a query that had been taking several minutes to execute and bring its execution time down to just a few seconds simply by rewriting some joins in such a way that, when thinking only about how data is related, appears to be quite bizarre, but when thinking about how a query will be executed by MySQL makes good sense.

I learned about how indexes are used, not just in theory but actually how MySQL looks for something within an index, and I learned about how I can use indexes to make it so MySQL doesn’t have to touch the underlying table data for some SELECT queries, (quite the speed enhancement there). I learned more about InnoDB than I thought I would know for quite some time. There’s a great appendix about the Sphinx search server, which is a product that I’ve been interested in for quite a while. The appendix gave me the introduction that I needed, and I hope to start using Sphinx to power some searches soon.

If you work with MySQL databases a lot, and especially if you are involved in designing them, then High Performance MySQL is a very good book to have on hand. Even if you don’t read it from cover to cover like I did it’s a great reference and will help you speed up your MySQL instances.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

I’ve read a lot of Tom Clancy books over the years, and other thrillers, but for some reason have never read anything by Robert Ludlum until now. I’m not sure how I missed his work, after all, he’s the guy that wrote The Bourne Identity, but somehow I managed to stay away. Earlier this spring a neighbour put a bunch of books out in the recycling, and I picked them up. There was a treasure trove of thirty-six books out there, two by Robert Ludlum, including The Holcroft Covenant, which is a pretty good read.

Reading The Holcroft Covenant reminded me of older times and stories, when there were more people who remembered the World Wars than didn’t, and conspiracy theories could be created about secret Nazi societies run by generals who escaped prosecution after the war, and perhaps by their children. The story lines of The Holcroft Covenant weave themselves slowly together, and in true thriller fashion I frustratingly figured out what had to be done long before the characters did. For a book that will keep you on the edge of your seat, (or bed, or whatever), this is a good one, although don’t try to read it all in one sitting like some other books that I have read recently, it’s a bit long for that, (but every page earns its place).

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

Another thriller down, and written by the same author as the previous book, (I kind of go in batches). In The Sinner Tess Gerritsen gave us another book that’s easy to read and hard to put down. It allowed me to, hopefully, get my fill of escaping into a world of mystery. Also, it’s not crazy long so it is a good book for a long flight, depending on how fast you read.

Time to get back to the computer-related brick I have on the nightstand.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

I’m behind on writing up the books I read. A few weeks ago I read another of the Alphabet Mysteries, B is for Burglar by Sue Grafton. It was quick, entertaining, twisty, (in a good way), and fun. If you like whodunnits, (apparently whodunnits is a real word – my spellchecker didn’t pick that up), then you’ll probably like B is for Burglar, and in all honesty, the whole series.

There are a bunch more of these on the shelf waiting to be read, but I don’t want to go too fast since I tend to read them in one, quite long, sitting, and I have other things that I have to do. I am looking forward to reading them, though.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)