Book Review

Book Review: Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra, 2nd Edition

When I discovered the first edition of Carl D. Meyer’s book on “Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra”, I considered it the best book on Linear Algebra I was aware of — and surely the best available book for an application-minded reader. In short: the book I really wished had been available when I was a graduate student and encountering this material for the first time.

So it was with great excitement and curiosity when I saw that a new, second edition was available. How could a near-perfect book be made even better?

Book Review: Learning eBPF

The extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF for short, is a plugin architecture for the Linux kernel. Using eBPF, it is possible to load (short) programs into the kernel at runtime, and have them be executed by the kernel. As the name suggests, the technology started out as a method to build custom filters for network packets, but it has since been extended and become much more general.

Read Again: The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric S. Raymond

In a moment of nostalgia, I picked up my copy of “The Art of UNIX Programming” by Eric S. Raymond (esr) and flipped through it again. It’s a book I’ve had since when it came out in 2004, and that I’ve always been quite fond of. I was looking forward to a review of “the way the future was”, as viewed from the early 2000s. So, it came as a bit of a surprise to me to find that the book seems to have aged rather poorly.

Book Review: Two Books on Analytic Number Theory

Analytic number theory is the application of methods from analysis to the study of integers, in particular primes. This may seem paradoxical: at the heart of analysis lie notions of continuity and differentiability — and what could be more discrete and discontinuous than the set of primes?

Book Reviews: Three Books on Linear Algebra

Linear Algebra is one of the foundational topics for all applied mathematics. But compared to Analysis, it initially often feels stranger and less familiar. Although technically not hard, the level of abstraction is higher, making it hard to see what all the formalism is supposed to achieve.