What I'm reading

On Winston Churchill's first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to...

Unlock the secrets to creating random mazes! Whether you're a game developer, an algorithm connoisseur, or simply in search of a new puzzle, you're about to level up. Learn algorithms to randomly generate mazes in a variety of shapes, sizes, and dimensions. Bend them into Moebius strips, fold them into cubes, and wrap...

The Prince shocked Europe on publication with its ruthless tactics for gaining absolute power and its abandonment of conventional morality. Niccolò Machiavelli came to be regarded as some by an agent of the Devil and his name taken for the intriguer 'Machevill' of Jacobean tragedy. For his treatise on statecraft...

For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich countries and poor countries. We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It's a comforting tale, and...

Written in Greek by the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher, without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. While the...

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese military treatise dating from the late Spring and Autumn period (roughly 5th century BC). Attributed to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, the work is composed of 13 chapters, each one devoted to a different aspect of warfare. It has influenced both Eastern and Western...

Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his adventure to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a...

Epictetus, a Greek stoic and freed slave, ran a thriving philosophy school in Nicropolis in the early second century AD. His animated discussions were celebrated for their rhetorical wizardry and were written down by Arrian, his most famous pupil. Together with the Enchiridion, a manual of his main ideas, and the...

When you have a question about C# 5.0 or the .NET CLR, this bestselling guide has precisely the answers you need. Uniquely organized around concepts and use cases, this updated fifth edition features a reorganized section on concurrency, threading, and parallel programming—including in-depth coverage of C# 5.0's new...

Dependency Injection Principles, Practices, and Patterns is a revised and expanded edition of the bestselling classic Dependency Injection in .NET. It teaches you DI from the ground up, featuring relevant examples, patterns, and anti-patterns for creating loosely coupled, well-structured applications.

Dependency Injection is a great way to reduce tight coupling between software components. Instead of hard-coding dependencies, such as specifying a database driver, you inject a list of services that a component may need. The services are then connected by a third party. This technique enables you to better manage...