Michael Koltsov's den

I haven’t realized that before, but checking your email on the beach is sooo convenient =)

Definitely, Moscow is one the best destination you’ll choose to download torrents =) 70 Mbps on a free public wifi network with 5Ghz connection!

First things first. This book is 5 years old. FIVE YEARS! During this period of time Scala as a language has been evolving with a noticeable  speed.

Is it still relevant? Yes, it is. Apart from a few chapters that’s dedicated to Actors and collections this book still contains a lot of useful information for an avid Scala-newbie.

Am I kidding? Not really. The explanation of type classes that’s inside of this book is the best that I’ve ever seen.

Even if you don’t see a reason to read the book from cover to cover I would recommend  to skim through the “Type system” & “Using implicits” chapters. They’re highly comprehensive and will provide you with information that’ll definitely make your life as a Scala developer easier.

My score 4/5

THE FUSION-FESTIVAL

End of June: the same procedure as every year: On a former Russian military airfield. In the middle of nowhere in the fields of northern Germany. FUSION arises, the biggest holiday camp all over the nothern hemisphere! The motto: 4 days of ‘holiday communism’ – and the programme covers it all:

Music of all kinds, theatre, performance and cinema, and added in the whole spectrum of installations, interaction, arts and communication. Diversity of people, diverse in their intentions. Still, their strive for individual freedom unites them, everybody finding her and his own way of action. Free of boundaries and prejudice.

Disclaimer: The book that I’ve read is the newest edition available at safari

I’m not even sure whom this book is dedicated to. If you’re a Scala developer then this book is too outdated due to that most of the APIs it explains are either deprecated of heavily rewritten. If you’re a DevOps… well, you don’t read books at all. You can definitely use it as a reference for some of the SBT commands, but there’re lots of  such references available on the Internet with convenient search by word as well as code examples.

You would definitely find another thing to spend your money on than buying this book.

My score: 2 stars

This book has an outstanding goal – teaching FP principles to those who might have close to no experience with functional programming. I reckon that’s not doable during the coarse of a few hundred pages. Fortunately, this book delivers that what it has promised.

All the book’s materials are split into the chunks of textual information and exercises you’re encouraged to do in order to fully absorb all the meaningful information you might otherwise forget in a day.Since starting to read I understood a lot of concepts that previously I thought of as too complex for me which made my life a lot easier and my code better.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that the most important parts of the book were 5 first chapters as well as 3 last chapters. Besides these chapters I got lost trying to digest some of the concepts that this book has tried to teach me. Apparently that has something to do with the amount of exercises you need to complete to make a progress with this book. I’ve spent more than 2 months in reading and doing the book’s exercises, which was a real exhaustive experience and made me glad that finally I’ve finished this book without abandoning it due to frustration.

My score is 4/5. Authors need to grasp more teaching experience to make their book easier to comprehend and get rid of some useless exercises but keep all the important ones.

Once again, drifting through melancholy.

Norwegian disco with an unbelievably beautiful ending. I’ve heard of it from a mix by Tycho from the lovely city of San Francisco.

Pure Nexus was the best thing that has happened to my tablet & phone since the moment that I’ve rooted them. It retains the pure Nexus experience, but dissolves all the unnecessary crap that Google tends to install on its “flagman” phones.

After installing it memory consumption has significantly dropped as well as battery life improvement has been obtained. All the necessary widgets I got used to are already there pre-installed, so it has helped me to get rid of some stuff I was struggling to take with me on every phone (i. e. yahoo weather widget).

This thing  is one of the most awesome IT job market research I’ve ever seen. I can’t stand from not playing with it.

I set a goal to start being productive with React & its ecosystem throughout a week. As the goal was set I had to find out what will be the best approach to achieve it. Trying to comprehend all these Fluxes, Reduxes & Immutable. JS  through a course of a couple of days seemed impossible to me. Since I’m usually a book-type of guy, at first I’ve decided to read a book … and then BOOM …  i’m a seasoned React pro. 

To make a long story short, that didn’t happen. This book can definitely help you to comprehend the basics of using a new framework, but these days it’s not sufficient due to so called “Javascript fatigue”, which can be described in simple terms as a never ending flood of JS-frameworks & libraries you need to learn to comprehend a recently written webapp.

The book is good for beginners, for whom it might be their first introduction to the world of modern apps. Learning the basics didn’t give me much since React has a pretty lean learning curve, which doesn’t require anything but any knowledge of Javascript.

The thing that gave me a lot of pain was Redux, which is de-facto standard in writing React apps these days. Unfortunately the book doesn’t contain much about it apart from its mentioning as well as a link to a Github repo with an app written with Redux in mind.

This manual has helped me more, but to be fair, it’s dedicated to Redux(however, it also explains most of the essential React basics you’d need to be productive). I also reckon that it’s much more lengthier than the reviewed book.

As a Scala developer I find React + Redux very exciting. It’s hard to overestimate how important it is to base front-end apps on robust architecture, which Redux+React helps you to do by obliging  you to use some of the best glimpses of Functional programming.

 Although I would not recommend this book as a one-weekend read I can definitely say that the book is one of the most convenient, well-written and detailed technical books dedicated to one particular technology I’ve ever seen.

You can start small, read a couple of first chapters and you’d be good to go using it everyday without any problems at all. But if you’ll dedicate a bit more time into reading it and executing tons of examples that come with it you’ll become a die-hard Elasticsearch professional without you even noticing that =)

As I’ve said the book is very well written, although some parts of it are a bit outdated which definitely adds more sense to try to run the examples by yourself in order to check whether they work on current release or not.

My score 5/5

Alvin Alexander has such a nice blog that almost anyone who has a question that has something to do with Scala will definitely end up getting to his website at least once.

I’ve decided to give his book a try and i didn’t get disappointed. First I thought I would skim through it in a couple of hours due to relatively easy concepts and redundant information that I might  have known before. Unfortunately (luckily?), that didn’t happen.

The book is slightly outdated (who needs Scalatra or pure lift-JSON these days?), though delivers a lot of useful concepts that I’ve happily put under my belt.

My score 4/5

It needs to be updated + I’d like to remove a lot of worthless water that’s poured upon you here and there in  the “Discussion” parts of every chapter.