READIN: Data Crunching

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READIN started out as a place for me to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly) how to design a web site.

There has been some mission drift here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of the main things I write about here are reading books, listening to (and playing) music, and watching the movies. Also I write about the work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.

The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.

See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.

READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.

🦋 Data Crunching

This morning I started reading Data Crunching, by Greg Wilson, which Bill Delavega recommended on his site, Dispatches From the Prairie. The subject of the book is an activity that occupies a fair (and growing) piece of my attention, namely converting data between different file formats.

Wilson writes in an engaging and accessible style, and his examples are useful. So far (I'm reading Chapter 2) there is an unresolved ambiguity about writing reusable code vs. being "reasonably sure" your code will never be reused. (I think this ambiguity will not be resolved because it's pretty universal; I've encountered it a lot in my own work and never been able to resolve it beyond making what seem like reasonable compromises.)

A bonus: A lot of the examples are in Python, which is a language I've been wanting to start using for a while now.

posted afternoon of November 7th, 2005: Respond
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🦋 Data Crunching

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