Indie – Page 3 – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Living with CMT: A Mother & Son Journey through Charcot Marie Tooth Disease

By Scott J. Pearson | October 16, 2021October 16, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

A close friend of mine was recently diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT). It’s a disease of the nerves (a neuropathy) that especially affects the distal parts of legs and arms. I’ve had a longtime curiosity about how diseases affect life, and I like to read. Therefore, I bought this book to empathize with his experience more. Here, Johnson describes her lifelong experiences on a particularly difficult life journey with CMT. She does so with the…

Biostatistics Indie

Best Practices in Data Cleaning

By Scott J. Pearson | July 18, 2021July 18, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

Professionally, I write software used for data collection in biomedical research projects. My current project extends from data collection into the field of interpretation. Combining these demands requires that I learn something about data cleaning. Thus, this book’s title caught my eye. It is an academic book, not a popular book. I usually write in-depth book reviews on what I read, so I am writing one here. This book seems like it began as an…

Cybersecurity Indie Software-Technology

Cybersecurity: Advanced and Effective Measures to Secure Your Cyber Networks

By Scott J. Pearson | June 22, 2020November 23, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

This book attempts to provide basic and practical measures that can guide an IT professional into more security expertise. It claims that it can teach the reader methods on how to detect vulnerabilities. It succeeds in surveying the technologies relevant to the task, but it falls short in the execution of writing. Lewis, no doubt, is a good security professional. However, he does not explain a topic thoroughly. He is too terse and concise. He…

Indie Software-Technology

JavaScript from ES5 to ESNext

By Scott J. Pearson | May 19, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

In recent years, JavaScript (JS) has seen a resurgence in popularity. From NodeJS on servers to PhoneGap on mobile devices to common standards in web browsers, JS seems to be everywhere. ES is the abbreviation for ECMA Script, the standard which JS implements. This book covers in detail the advance of the ES standards from earlier days (ES5) to 2019 (ESNext). Much effort has been given on the issue of “callback hell” and features resulting…

Biostatistics Indie Software-Technology

Ultimate Step by Step Guide to Machine Learning Using Python

By Scott J. Pearson | May 4, 2020June 26, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

The conscientious reader should carefully heed the words of this title. The book functions as an introduction to Python that leads, step by step, to using it with Machine Learning. It takes the shortest and easiest path to get there. As such, it provides fairly immediate gratification for the reader. With such low-hanging fruit, its intended audience is beginners without a lot of knowledge in computer science. For that audience, Anis effectively communicates his message.…

Indie Software-Technology

The Vue Handbook

By Scott J. Pearson | April 29, 2020April 29, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

Vue is a popular software programming package based off of JavaScript. It is an add-on that makes a client’s web browser to all sorts of fun and useful things. Through using templating and a centralized API, it can help create fast user interfaces on the web. It’s more-or-less a competitor with other JavaScript libraries like React. Vue functions as a templating engine in JavaScript. That means that it is a client-side templating engine (in your…

Indie Software-Technology

The React Handbook by Flavio Copes

By Scott J. Pearson | April 19, 2020April 22, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

Flavio Copes, an expert on JavaScript, maintains a blog and manages courses that introduce folks to the myriad uses of this long-time staple of a computer language. React is a technology by which JS is used to create more responsive websites for users. These websites operate more quickly and do not wait as often for servers to respond. In this book, Copes first covers the advances in JavaScript over the past few years. Those who…

Biography-Memoir History Indie

Harriet Tubman by Adrian Ramos

By Scott J. Pearson | March 19, 2020April 4, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

Americans, like me, prefer to think of their country as valuing where you end up rather than where you were born. They like to think that they judge people based on the content of their character rather than the peculiarities of their parentage. If these suppositions suggest how American someone is, then Harriet Tubman is about as American as they get. This biography helps us understand why. At 141 pages, Ramos’ work is not a…

Indie Software-Technology

The Node.js Handbook by Flavio Copes

By Scott J. Pearson | February 18, 2020February 18, 2020 by Scott J. Pearson

This book is written by Flavio Copes, an Italian computer-science writer who maintains his own blog (linked below). He has written many blog posts in English about relevant topics of interest to software developers. He seems to have transformed many of these blog posts into books and has independently published these. Some of these books are even freely downloadable with the sole cost of signing up for a free email list. Overall, though presumably more…