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Zak Smith, artist behind Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, send out a message today that he's got a new site up and running. Zak is an incredible artist. His drawings are full of energy but balanced with incredible draftsmanship. My kind of stuff. Check it.

Hello everybody! Greetings from sunny Los Angeles. This is a mass
e-mail letting you all know i have a new site with new work posted
EVERY SINGLE DAY. It includes the porn drawings and anything else new
i feel like showing people that is good. The site is;
http://www.zaxart.com/sketchbook/

-zak

Here's a small sample from the Gravity's Rainbow book:

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

I'd never read this web usability classic before and my to-the-point review is this:

There's a reason this book is a classic in the field. It's smart, well written, funny and damned easy to read through*.

Quick hit reviews aside, I was surprised to learn that this book was at least partially written in a Bruegger's that I frequent. It's true. Steve Krug lives in the next town over and tapped out at least some of the book in a Bruegger's just a couple of miles from here. I feel just that much smarter by association

*It's a perfect book for a plane trip, so if you work on the web and haven't read this book pick it up before the next coast-to-coast or transatlantic (or pacific) flight. You'll be a better designer/developer/manager when you land on the other side.

Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction An excellent, truly nontechnical introduction to game theory. While there is some math, it's basic. The vast majority of the book is prose based, focusing on the underlying logic of game theory and using real world analogs to expand on specific points. If you've ever heard the phrases "Prisoner's Dilemma" or "zero sum game" and wondered what they were all about, this book might be just what you're looking for…

Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders Not surprisingly, considering my track record with his work, I really enjoyed this collection of Neil Gaiman's short fiction. Interestingly, the first (A Study in Emerald) and the last (The Monarch of the Glen) were easily my favorite tales in the volume. The first being a delicious mash-up of the world's of HP Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes (with a twist) and the last being a sequel of sorts to American Gods (my favorite Gaiman book? Maybe.) With a solid foundation like that I can say pretty confidently, if you've never read any of Gaiman's work, this is a fine place to start.

I have just finished reading The Baroque Cycle of Neal Stephenson, and feel like giving up writing entirely.

Twitter / Warren Ellis: I have just finished reading…

And again he mentions it on his blog, with an even better quote:

Which meant I finally got to finish reading the last of Neal Stephenson´s Baroque Cycle. I´d never normally recommend you read a 3000-page work, but the Cycle is just a towering piece of work, and I think you should read it before you die. A hundred pages from the end, I got that terrible longing sadness, the one that comes when you realise youŕe near the end of something and you´ĺl never have the joy of reading this in the same way again.

I felt the same way. I both devoured and dreaded the end. It was as satisfying an ending as Stephenson has ever managed, but there was still a part of me that was made empty by reading those last few pages. I'd been reading the books as they came out so it had been a two year journey for me- the gaps heightening my anticipation and, likely, my enjoyment. To finally say good bye to Eliza, Daniel Waterhouse and, most importantly, Jack Shaftoe felt like real loss.

Warren Ellis » And Even More Still Offline

I've been talking about this story to anyone who might have any interest at all in it over the past few weeks. That's a much smaller circle than I'd like it to be, but what can I tell you. not everyone is a nut for Holmes, Gaiman's writing and Lovecraft's dark universe like I am.

Anyway, I just found out there's a PDF available of the story available from Gaiman's site. So now I can share my geeked out enjoyment of this story with the whole Internet. That expands the circle of people who might care significantly.

It lives on Neil Gaiman's Short Stories page and is available as a PDF- A Study in Emerald.

Check it out, and if you like it, buy a volume or ten of Sandman or one of his proper novels the next time you're in a place with words for sale.

I check in on favorite authors from time to time to see when their next work is due. Stephenson certainly qualifies as a favorite so it was with glee that I found out that his new book Anathem is due out in September.

Digging around a little bit led me to Kaedrin's blog, which featured a quote from this Livejournal, which goes a little something like this:

He's writing a science fiction novel unrelated to Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. It's set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It's really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit, just like the pirates kept people engaged in the Baroque books. He's nearly finished writing it, and if he doesn't finish by the end of the calendar year he'll have to give some money back. If everything proceeds according to schedule, it should be available in stores in about a year.

My response to all of that is "sign me right up." For full disclosure's sake, I'll read pretty much anything the guy writes, but that sounds ready made for me to geek out over.

Am I bummed there's no Shaftoe or Waterhouse or appearance by Enoch Root? Sure I am (at least on some level.) I didn't gleefully work my way through through however many pages of Cryptonimicon and the Baroque Cycle (3500?) without coming away with an affection for the inhabitants of that world. Thing is, the above sounds so damn cool I just don't care. Platonic math meets John Carter (or, if you must, Star Wars)?

That's the stuff.

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design Another excellent book. The ideas outlined here would be of benefit to any web application. Small or large, the idea of paring down features to only those "necessary for the users to complete the activity the site is meant to support" is a noble one. I've, more often than I'm comfortable admitting, worked on projects where feature bloat ruled the day and I can tell you from bitter experience, giving in to "nice to have" features can be the absolute death of a project. The biggest disaster I've ever worked on was mostly sunk by feature bloat and lack of focus*.

There's plenty to take away from this well written examination of what's right and wrong with modern web application design. I read this on vacation and while I wouldn't have traded the hammock I was on or the excellent wine I was drinking for anything, some small part of me thought "wow, I'd love to be able to put some of this stuff to work immediately."

One thing I don't fully agree with is Hoekman's admonition, later on in the book, to throw away specifications and requirement documents. While that might work for the less complication applications he outlines in his book (excellent applications all), there's no way to do, for example, a detailed financial services application without relying on solid documentation. When there are complicated business rules in place throwing a developer and a designer in a room with a white board and having them "work it out" just isn't going to cut it.

Still, with a smaller scale, less structured application, the techniques and approaches in Designing the Obvious will be of benefit to anyone working in field of web application design and development. This is a recommended read.

*there was also a painful stab in the chest by a web application framework from hell to help that project into its grave.

Pro JavaScript Design Patterns An excellent book. There are plenty of takeaways from this intense examination of Object Oriented programming in JavaScript. I haven't worked on a project large enough to really benefit from OO JavaScript in the overall (classes/inheritance, etc), but even without switching over to a fully OO framework, there are optimization patterns and namespace patterns outlined in this book that can immediately prove useful no matter what scale of project you're working on.

From a pure "oh, that's cool!" perspective, the chapter on Chaining was a real eye opener. I'd looked at jQuery code, of course, but I'd never sat down to think about how he might have created the().ability().t0().keep().mashing().functions().together(). It's diabolically simple in concept (return this!), but also mighty powerful. Again, it's not one of the patterns I'm looking to adapt any time soon, but it was crazy interesting how simple it is in concept.

High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers This book? All kinds of interesting. I've been writing about performance a little bit here recently and this well written, concise book has really helped to expand my understanding of some of the issues involved. It also opened my eyes to a few new possibilities for performance improvement here at this site. One of which I'll be implementing some time this week- passively caching the "next" and "previous" images in all of my gallery flows. Meaning, if you land on this page, JS will work in the background downloading the images featured on the Next and Previous links. And no, that won't help my YSlow grade, Mr. YSlow junkie (actually there's not much I can do beyond dropping things like Google Analytics and Google Ads), but it will definitely help my users and that's the real point, isn't it?