Ricardo's rating:
  4.0
On Dec 6, 2014 Ricardo Banffy wrote: I've seen the future, and it's parallel
High performance computing is a vast field, and it makes sense when you have enormously diverse space filled with vastly different solutions - clusters of similar processors, dedicated in-processor vector hardware (such as Intel's AVX) or stand-alone GPGPUs, shared memory, message passing and so on. Writing efficient code for such machines is difficult and writing code that runs well on all kinds is, I dare do say, next to impossible.
The Xeon Phi presents a relatively simple model of homogeneous x86 processors with local vector facilities sharing a pool of memory. This books offers a good intro to HPC and goes into some depths that will help your code perform better on massively multi-core machines.
There was one nagging feeling that kept with me throughout this book. While it's geared towards current HPC problems, several architectural peculiarities of the Xeon Phi also hint towards the only credible future for CPUs. When even phones expose 4-core architectures to their programmers, learning to live with a large collection of relatively low performance cores is a must. While we won't see a Phi-based desktop anytime soon, 4 and 8 core architectures will eventually work their way into low-end machines everybody has. Ignore it at your own peril.
Full Review >
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Fundamentals of iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Development
Ricardo's rating:
4.0
On Jul 22, 2013 Ricardo Banffy wrote: Programming iOS 5, 2nd Edition, by Matt Neuburg
A thorough tour through iOS development Full Review >
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A Brain-Friendly Guide
Ricardo's rating:
4.0
On Mar 23, 2012 Ricardo Banffy wrote: Benedetti and Cranley's Head First jQuery
A very helpful book for those who want to get familiar with jQuery. The examples cover a great deal of common-use functionality and offer some guidance on better practices and style for those who are unfamiliar to modern JavaScript programming. Full Review >
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with HTML5 canvas, jQuery, and More
Ricardo's rating:
4.0
On Oct 7, 2011 Ricardo Banffy wrote: Supercharged JavaScript Graphics, by Raffaele Cecco (O'Reilly, 2011)
I loved reviewing this book. Not only I learned a lot of new, cool tricks, the methods, tools and techniques I learned, from JavaScript code optimization to proper usage of jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap, were well worth the time invested in reading the book. Full Review >
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Ricardo's rating:
4.0
On Jul 26, 2011 Ricardo Banffy wrote: An intimidating subject made easy for teens
Physics is an intimidating subject this (comic-)book manages to tackle in a way most teenagers will find easy to understand. More to the point, they will, hopefully, find it fun and compelling too. Full Review >
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Ricardo's rating:
4.0
On Jun 10, 2011 Ricardo Banffy wrote: Learning Android, by Marko Gargenta
This is a fairly good book that will take you through your first steps on Android application development. It goes over key concepts like activities, services, intents and asynchronous tasks, explores the helpers and builders in Eclipse (but does not refrain itself from going into the XML when needed) and does so by going through the development of a simple application. I think the best way to go through this book is to follow along and build your own. If the book has any weak spot... Full Review >
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Distilling Rich Information from Messy Data
Ricardo's rating:
4.0
On Apr 25, 2011 Ricardo Banffy wrote: Matthew Russell's 21 Recipes for Mining Twitter
This is a very short, very practical way to get you started exploring the Twitter APIs on your own Full Review >
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Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites
Ricardo's rating:
5.0
On Feb 7, 2011 Ricardo Banffy wrote: A book that covers an awesome lot of ground
This book covers a lot of ground. It's, at times, a bit vertiginous in the amount of subjects and technologies it touches per chapter, and is not always easy to follow. It can also introduce so many interesting things that, by the time you finished becoming familiar with all of them, after wandering for hours on the web, jumping from interesting technology to interesting technology, you may have forgotten what took you to these places and wonder where you were in the book. Time spent reading it is, however, time very well spent. When you finish it, you will have at least a cursory familiarity with tools like OAuth, CouchDB, Redis, MapReduce, NumPy (and the Python programming language, albeit it will help you a lot if you know your way around Python before you start the book), Graphviz, SIMILE widgets, NLTK, various service APIs and data formats, and will be well equipped to explore those rich datasets on your own. The chapters are well compartmentalized and it's easy to pick chapters to read according to your needs. I know that, when I face the problems they tackle, I will do exactly that.
If you do any kind of analysis and visualization of social-generated data that's on the web, this book is a good pick. Even if your datasets are not from the web, you may find the parts on analysis and visualization very interesting. Full Review >
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Ricardo's rating:
3.0
On Jan 29, 2011 Ricardo Banffy wrote: Marketers will love it, programmers may find it useful
Facebook Marketing is not a book for programmers. For us, it's a very hard read and finishing it took some determination. Neither it is for startups that intend to be the next Zynga, as it offers little advice for those, specially with regard to monetization options. It contains, however, good advice for already established entities that want or need to use Facebook as a vehicle for engaging current and acquiring new clients... Full Review >
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Dive into the Future of Web Development
Ricardo's rating:
4.0
On Dec 21, 2010 Ricardo Banffy wrote: HTML5: Up and Running - A fun-to-read intro to HTML5
This is a well written, fun to read book on what is new in HTML 5, why it's important and how it came into existence. It introduces new tags, reminded me of some old and forgotten and, in general, improved the quality of the HTML I write Full Review >
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Google Tools to Add Power to Your JavaScript
Ricardo's rating:
4.0
On Dec 12, 2010 Ricardo Banffy wrote: On "Closure: The Definitive Guide" by Michael Bolin
“Closure: The Definitive Guide†by Michael Bolin does a very nice job on explaining a battle-tested, very complex tool that helps maintaining very complex JavaScript codebases manageable and understandable. Full Review >
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