Book Reviews

Software-Technology

Advanced PHP Programming: A practical guide to developing large-scale Web sites and applications with PHP 5

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by George Scholassnagle(c) Copyright 2004 This book applies both to PHP 5 and PHP 7 (no PHP 6 exists) fairly well because of the large amount of overlap between the versions. This book is meant to build up experts at PHP development. It handles everything ranging from cookies, to APIs, to extending PHP via C. At 650-pages, it’s a heavy read. There are lots of code examples as well as implementations of features (e.g., user…

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Software-Technology

Ry’s Git Tutorial

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by Ryan HodsoneBook (free) This book is a free purchase from Amazon. (You can’t beat that price!) It previews the Git utilities now popular in the field of revision/change management software. It can keep track of your old files in a programming project and coordinate among multiple developers (therein facilitating distributed development). I use Git at work. I’ve seen teammates more advanced at Git interrogate a Git database to extract useful information, restore backups, and…

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Healthcare

Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by Helen Bynum(c) Copyright 2012, 2015. This book, part of Oxford University Press’s series on “biographies” of diseases, highlights one disease the haunted humankind for millennia – tuberculosis/consumption. This battle, like its infectious disease brethren of malaria and yellow fever, is as old as recorded civilization. Like most infectious diseases, it has become a victim of its success in that its prevalence is now only among some of the “less desirables” of humanity: The developing…

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Healthcare

A History of Public Health

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by George Rosen(c) Copyright 1958, 1993, 2015. George Rosen wrote this book, originally published in 1958, about the progress that humanity has made in this field. He was optimistic about the progress made with antibiotics and vaccines. He saw opportunity for the eradication of smallpox and malaria. He saw the trajectory of human progress as going upwards. In 2018, this optimism has been somewhat muted by the realities of HIV/AIDS, by the lingering persistence of…

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Healthcare Poverty

Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by Paul Farmer Copyright (c) 2001. Paul Farmer is a genius and is worthy of reading by anyone interested in his field of medical anthropology. An MD/PhD professor of Harvard and founder of Partners in Health, Farmer, perhaps better than anyone else alive, embodies the ethic that health care is a human right. In this book, he writes on his experiences in Haiti. He writes of fighting AIDS and Tuberculosis. He points out that poverty…

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Humanities

Gestalt Psychology: The Definitive Statement of the Gestalt Theory

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by Wolfgang KoehlerCopyright (c) 1947. I picked this book to read because I was interested in how the average computer user approaches a computer screen. I’ve been convinced for some time now (maybe 15-20 years) that people approach computers not through user manuals nor even through tips on how to use it. They approach the computer through their intuition. Intuition has a lot to do with the psychological concept of Gestalt, so I’ve learned. The…

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Software-Technology

Advanced R

By Scott J. Pearson | by Scott J. Pearson

by Hadley Wickhamhttp://adv-r.had.co.nz/ Hadley brings an in-depth analysis of the R statistical language in this book and opens up more questions as it enlightens the reader to possibilities with R. This book is only for the nerds of the nerds as it explores the R programming language, a language used mainly by non-programmers for statistical analysis. As such, the readership for this book is presumably small. Nonetheless, it fills a need as it supplies R…

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