Flapart provides alternate covers for your books – ideal for reading in public places, or leaving on your coffee table.
Reading
The Taming of the Screw
Forbes has a great article entitled The Taming of the Screw which tells of a new redesign of the screw. “The humble screw has changed little in 2,000 years, until a stubborn engineer at Illinois Tool Works came up with a fascinating new twist.” – Very cool! Reminds me of a great book I read a year or so back: One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw which I highly recommend. It’s far more interesting than it sounds. I promise.
Hat tip to Jason Kottke for the link.
The Grammar of Ornament
I received some excellent books for my birthday this year, including The Grammar of Ornament, a stunning mixture of design knowledge, history and inspiration. The book, first printed in the middle of the 19th century, discusses a wide swath of ornamental styles and design from a wide array of sources and eras, including ancient Byzantinium, Greece, and Egypt, Imperial China and the European Renaissance.
While I have already spent a lot of time flipping pages, marvelling at the color reproductions, I have also started reading the book from cover to cover, just as I do with any other history source. The Grammar of Ornament provides an amazing opportunity to learn more about the history of those design elements we see throughout our day. All the better that it proves to be a great fount of ideas, even for those of us who design for an electronic medium.
My Development Bookshelf
I have added a new section to the Web Development category titled Bookshelf, which is to hold reviews of the various books that I use in my day-to-day Web development and design projects. Hopefully my thoughts on the books will prove useful to others as they look for the right book(s) for a specific project, or to learn a particular technology. While I will do my best to provide some detail with each review, I must admit that I have a few books that sit on the shelf unread. For the most part, these unread volumes are review copies, often covering technologies that I just haven’t had the time to pick up. Such is life. I will update these sparse entries when I have had a chance to use the books.
I would also love to hear any recommendations for alternate, or companion books on the subjects covered by each. So, please post a comment, or send me your suggestions!
'PR'-otaku
Some days you run across a resource that is utterly amazing. And while I found this one a good deal after I read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, I think I will reread the book alongside Joe Clark’s site: Logging and annotating William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition’.
The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History
Sarah’s mom and dad gave me this book a few months back and as I hadn’t heard of it I was quite intrigued. Philip Bobbitt provides an impressive amount of detail in each page. While this leads to a somewhat dry writing-style, the insights and connections presented easily make it worthwhile. I may begin taking notes as I read to solidify my understanding of the subjects.
Covering the situations surrounding war and peace over the last six centuries is breathtaking in scope, but required background if one is to understand our past and its relation to the tumultuous present.
It is important to me that I challenge my mind these days. It is all too easy to fall into a routine of complacency fed by entertainment devices.
I’ll add more to this entry as I read.