He does go on doesn't he?

Cloud Application Architectures: Building Applications and Infrastructure in the Cloud by George Reese
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I picked up this book really looking forward to the premise. Sadly the book was a let down on a number of fronts. Specifically: The focus on Amazon AWS really detracted from general discussion of the cloud. Surely the edit could have rounded out the common refrain of you could do this with S3 but I’m not sure about anyone else. There are a large number of missing diagrams in my print. The author tends to lay out the flaws of traditional infrastructure followed by cloud issues with the same design problem. It makes you feel as though the cloud is only ready to be sold, not used in anger. Repetition was common enough to be noticeable. What is the point of Appendix A (a reference guide to the aws command line tools)? I’m trying to architect solutions not write operations manuals!

In fairness there is some good discussion about the approach to availability and some techniques for applying cloud solutions. However O’Reilly and the author could both do better than this rushed and flawed effort.”

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The Joy of Clojure by Michael Fogus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is lovely. As a second book about Clojure it propels you from basic understanding through to deep understanding. It doesn’t exhaustively cover the library for Clojure but it covers the thought process behind the language and definitely exhorts a better style of development. The information flow doesn’t let up for all the chapters and as such you feel like you’ve learned an immense amount aas you move through the book. Having said that the conclusion is pretty much, we’ve stopped writing here’s a closing paragraph. Which is odd considering the rest of the book.

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