I have never read much Woolf and always thought I ought to. I found her essay, which looks at what it means to be a woman who makes art was a lot more accessible than I had been led to believe her writing would be. She does take a rather circuitious route to make the point sometimes, but that’s OK when you are sitting in the garden in the sunshine. The essay is also fascinating historically — I found it amazing how far society has evolved in its treatment of women in some ways, and disturbing how little has changed in others.

Surprisingly given how influential it is, it has taken me this long to get round to reading Fowler’s classic. It presents a catalogue of common refactoring wrapped in some material about the importance and usefulness of refactoring as a practice. It embraces the late-90s technique of presenting material as a pattern catalogue which works reasonably well for the examples presented, but starts to show its limitations when discussing "big refactorings" later on in the book. Nevertheless an excellent reference, and I learned a lot from it.

I found that the book concentrated rather too much on the French Left, so a lot of it was over my head. Nevertheless, the critique of how the post-May 68 left intellectuals have come to an empty critique of power nominally in the name of the working class is solid.

Another little book, this time an intro level scheme book. I’m writing an implementation of Scheme at the moment, and partially reading rounbd the subject. I would say this was a little too introductory, but sort of charming. It gives a reasonable into to thinking recursively, but I found the novelty of its question and answer style presentation wore rather thin after a couple of chapters.

I love short books, especially short tech books! In fewer than 30 pages, Karl manages to cover the bare minimum you need to know to put Redis to work. Great stuff.