This book is a philosophical exploration of the past, present, and future of humankind’s ability to discover and interact in an environment suffering with information overload. Ambient Findability isn’t a technical how-to book to show you how to design a better information system. Instead, it is an idea book, meant to make you think about the different ways we find information in our daily lives. It explores concepts such as wayfinding, metadata, folksonomies, taxonomies, and other information retrieval theories all in the attempt to help the reader discover new ways of making their data more findable. It is a gripping read that is sure to make anyone dealing with modern information floods ponder how we can improve our systems.

Beyond Fear is the latest book from Bruce Schneier, one of the greatest computer security minds ever, is easily his least technical… but in a good way. His goal in this book is to help the common person, who might not even know how to turn a computer on, understand how to make better security decisions. Even more relevant in this time of terrorism, this book helps us get past the fear mongering of every salesman and politician saying they can protect us. Instead,it helps us learn how to make good decisions about how we can protect ourselves. If you are at all interested in how to see past the hype and make good decisions for yourself, your family, your business, or your country then I can’t recommend this book enough.

Need to know how to do something in SQL? The SQL Cookbook probably has the answer. I particularly like the section on working with date ranges. The book also has a nice appendix on the windowing feature the newer DBs provide. This book won’t give you much new information you probably haven’t seen before if you have been working with SQL for a while, but it will serve as a great reference for recalling those techniques.

I had high expectations of “Design Patterns In C#” by Steven John Metsker but unfortunately the book didn’t live up to them. This book is part of the “Software Patterns Series” of books that was started off by the classic “Design Patterns” by “The Gang of Four”(GoF), as they are known. That book is amazing and should be part of every software developer’s library.

Metsker’s book assumes the reader has studied the GoF book and is knowledgeable in the basic 23 design patterns covered in it. Therefore, this book is intended to be a supplement to the original classic, expanding on it to show implementations in C# and leaving the in-depth rational of the design patterns to be described in the original. I feel like this was the correct approach to take because the original masterpiece does such a good job at introducing the subject of design patterns and giving the reader a solid foundation.

My main complaint about “Design Patterns In C#” is the “challenges” this book includes throughout the text. I have no problem with exercises for the reader to try but the way this book presents them makes the actual text useless as a reference.

In many chapters, the major UML diagram and/or coding example showing how to implement a given design pattern is left with missing parts for the reader to fill in. This book’s audience is experienced developers, who are looking for the author’s opinion on the proper ways to implement a given design pattern using all the features of C#. Because of the “challenges” sections, the author is leaving out the exact parts of the book the developer needs. It is very frustrating to have to consult an appendix every couple of pages before making sense of the text following a “challenge”. This book should have left out the “challenges” and instead imitated the original “Design Patterns” book by becoming a no nonsense reference for software architects.

My other, smaller, complaint about this book is that it uses one large source code base for its examples instead of giving the reader a separate, small example for every pattern. If the author had chosen to use a small example for each chapter then they would have remained more independent of each other and easier to use as a reference. But, as I covered above, the author pretty much killed any chance of this book being a useful reference.

This book wasn’t all bad. The author did do a good job of showing which specific features of the C# language, such as interfaces, applied well to the various design patterns and made their implementations cleaner. I also liked that the author used UML instead of the older OMT used by the GoF book. To be fair to the original book, UML was not standardized at the time of its writing. Overall, I would recommend against purchasing “Design Patterns In C#” because of its “challenges” sections.

For anyone who I haven’t scared off yet, here is the two books I bought:

	Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets: A Comprehensive Guide to Trading Methods and Applications by John J. Murphy
	A Complete Guide to Technical Trading Tactics : How to Profit Using Pivot Points, Candlesticks & Other Indicators by John L. Person

I am personally going to use this investment guide to manage Aliciana’s 401k. This book convinced us to start funding her 401k as soon as possible and to continue funding it over her entire career. Everyone should fund their 401k or IRA as much as possible… the tax benefits are amazing! The true magic of his plan is to simply start saving a little money out of every paycheck as early in your life as possible, save a ton on your taxes, and let compounded interest turn it into a large sum by the time you retire.

This book gives a very convincing analysis which supports its claim that for long term investing you are better off buying “Total Market Index Funds” and similar types of funds for bonds and REITs. These types of funds won’t make you rich overnight but over 20 years they will provide a very good annual return, at least 10% APR for the stock fund.

So, I recommend reading this book for anyone who has to manage their retirement funds. If you are paying a financial planner to do it for you, chances are that you would be better off firing him and managing your funds yourself. The author gives plenty of real world data to back up this claim.

As for how I am going to manage our own retirement funds, based on this book’s advice, it is quite simple. I am going to allocate 80% of our 401k funds in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, 10% in the Vangaurd Total Bond Market Index Fund, and 10% in the Vanguard REIT Index Fund. As we age, I am going to slowly allocate more money into the bond and REIT funds, so that by the time we are 55 I should have 40% in the stock fund, 30% in the bond fund and 30% in the REIT fund. It really is that simple, no financial planner needed, all you need is this book.