I have not been tracking many developments in the Python world for various reasons. Recently I stumbled on to this book and learnt that a ton of things have happened since the last version of my IPython installation. In the last one year or so, it has found a very strong community of pythonistas and is being used by professors in their classrooms. ipynb is turning out to be a format for submitting programming assignments.

If you interview some of the brightest minds in the world and get to know about their productivity hacks (sometimes their role model’s hacks), and compile all of their ideas in to a format that is easily digestible, you get this book. Nothing in this book is really something that one would not have come across. But it is easy to forget hacks that make our lives productive. Sometimes reading other’s work habits can create awareness of the way we go about doing our work.

This book takes a rather difficult topic, “algorithmic complexity”, and explains it in a way that any reader with a bit of curiosity towards algorithmic world can understand most of its contents. This is actually not a book in the traditional sense of it. ETH Zurich offered a public lecture series called, “ The Open Class – Seven Wonders of Informatics” in the fall of 2005 and this book has been written based on those lecture series.

I firmly believe that when you are trying to learn something, it is always “easy come, easy go”. It is also applicable to other aspects like love, friendship etc. A friend who seems to come in to your life effortlessly also fades out of your life quickly. So, is the case with love, I guess. This book is total crap. The author gives a sermon on how to learn things in the first twenty hours.

The cover page of the book gives the solution to the popular puzzle, Is it possible for a knight to tour the chessboard, visiting every square once and only once, and return to its initial square? The solution to the puzzle lies in thinking about a graph containing vertices as squares of the chess board and the adjacency of two vertices based on the validity of a knight move.