Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Ry’s Git Tutorial

By Scott J. Pearson | September 24, 2018 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…

Healthcare

Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis

By Scott J. Pearson | September 19, 2018 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…

Healthcare

A History of Public Health

By Scott J. Pearson | September 19, 2018 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…

Books Healthcare

Resources to Explore: Health Care

By Scott J. Pearson | September 9, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

Healthcare Poverty

Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues

By Scott J. Pearson | September 9, 2018 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…

Humanities

Gestalt Psychology: The Definitive Statement of the Gestalt Theory

By Scott J. Pearson | August 28, 2018 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…

Software-Technology

Advanced R

By Scott J. Pearson | August 27, 2018 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…

Books Software-Technology

Resources to Explore: Software

By Scott J. Pearson | August 27, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

Ry’s Git Tutorial by Ryan Hodson Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction by Steve McConnell Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism by Mario Biagioli

Biostatistics Books Software-Technology

Resources to Explore: Data Science

By Scott J. Pearson | August 24, 2018June 26, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

Data Science by John D. Kelleher and Brendan Tierney Machine Learning for Predictive Data Analytics: Algorithms, Worked Examples, and Case Studies by John D. Kelleher, Brian MacNamee and Aoife D’Arcy

Healthcare

The Epidemic: A Global History of AIDS

By Scott J. Pearson | August 21, 2018 by Scott J. Pearson

by Joanathan EngelCopyright (c) 2006. Although this book is a little over a decade old, most of its history is still relevant to the equation when one speaks of HIV/AIDS. The history of the male-homosexual community combined with the history of IV-drug-user community combined with Asian/African transmissions is still locked in many of the same patterns that were present in 2006. Engel does a strong job of telling their stories and in so doing, telling…