The Book of Useless Information, by Noel Botham & The Useless Information Society

Comments: I think the title is a good enough summary, so I'm skipping straight to commentary. I rather enjoyed all the random facts. Although I think it is accurate that the information is all stuff I'll never need to know, it was rather interesting to learn it anyway. And there were all kinds of topics, too.

The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

Summary: This book is basically a collection of tips and other best practices in writing software (or preparing to write software or judging the software once parts of it are written).

Comments: This isn't really a book to read straight through. It does seem like it might be a good reference though. Assuming I remember that I have it.

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

Summary: This is the story of Augustus and Hazel, two teenagers who have cancer, and also the story of a book.

Comments: In spite of the cancer, this isn't a particularly depressing book. It's also not a trope of person beats cancer (at least for now) and goes on to save the world. It's mostly just a story of two teenagers and the adventure they have. I think the cancer aspect does make me think though. Cancer is rarely something that's relevant to my day-to-day life.

More Information Than You Require, by John Hodgman

Summary: This is a book of fake trivia. Everything in it contains some amount of untruth to it.

Comments: I think this book strikes a decent balance between truth and untruth. A certain percentage of the stories contain an element of truth to them prior to taking a turn for the weird. I found this to be a rather amusing book, but I certainly wouldn't rely on it for anything.

Code Complete, by Steve McConnell

Summary: This book is a series of tips about how to write good software. It starts with the design process, moves on to coding, and then debugging. The author manages to fit quite a few tidbits into about 1000 pages.

Comments: I think I learned quite a few things, but I would say most of the value of the book lies in being able to reference it later. And in spite of being long (and taking me 6 months to read), I found it interesting. I kept stopping to write down things that I found useful or amusing or that caused me to reflect on something. I did find a couple (probable?) inaccuracies, but neither of them had anything to do with code; they were both in examples. One related to the highways in western Washington (a reference to an exit that doesn't exist) and the other related to car speedometers (a claim that they read 0 when you're backing up because they can't go negative). I'm not sure what percentage of my comments related to code and what percentage were things like squee over the penguin that was on a picture of an iceburg or noticing random pictures from somewhere in western Washington (the author is from somewhere not far from Seattle, which is probably why places I'm familiar with kept popping up). My notes also included a long list of books and articles that might be worth reading. There were a number of references to studies that people had done, and I'm curious how they came up with their numbers and if they have any speculation as to cause. I would say it's worth reading for any programmers out there, but probably over the head of most other people.

The Book of Incredible Information

Summary: All kinds of random information you never needed to know, on a whole variety of subjects. And a surprising amount of random information about Canada.

Comments: This was fun to read. I came across a number of amusing facts. Apparently "E plurbis unum" was first used to describe salad dressing. Every page or pair of pages is a new topic, so this book is very much about breadth of knowledge, if knowledge is the right word for it. And every so often, the topic has something to do with Canada: famous Canadian entertainers, the history of the Mounties, etc. Rather amusing, I though.

A Hog On Ice, by Charles Earle Funk

Summary: This book gives the origins and history of a variety of expressions (such as the one that appears in the title)

Comments: This was a good book for reading on airplanes and such because I could read the section on some phrase, look to see if something interesting was going on outside, and return to my book if not, without interrupting my train of thought. One thing I should say is that the book was originally published in 1948, so you have to keep that in mind when the author talks about certain phrases being recent or makes reference to the last ten years or anything like that. There was a certain number of phrases I had never heard, but I guess that kinda proves his point that the expressions in common usage change over the years, and the ones I'm familiar with aren't necessarily the same as the ones that were in usage 60 years ago.