I just finished reading Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. The copy I have is now available if anyone reading this blog entry would be interested in reading it. (Offer limited to people living in Japan, or to people I know living in other countries.)

Senator Obama may or may not have what it takes to become the next President of the United States, but reading this book gives you the impression that he’s spent a lot more time thinking about what that job entails than the current occupant of that office. I wish him well in his campaign and expect to see good things from him regardless of the outcome of the 2008 election.

Recently a colleague turned me on to BookCrossing.com, which is a site that helps people set free their unused books. Because we have a lot of those, I have been slowly registering the ones we need to find new homes for before we can fit any new books on our overcrowded bookshelves. I’ve registered about 70 books so far, and plan to add more as time permits. If you would be interested in reading some of these, please feel free to let me know. If you live in Japan, I would be happy to mail them to you. If you have books of your own that are just taking up space in your home, please consider setting them free. Like people, books love to travel.

PHP Hacks by Jack D. Herrington
December 2005, O’Reilly Media, Inc.
468 pages, $29.95, paperback
Amazon.com | Amazon.co.jp

From generating Flash movies on the fly to adding interactive maps to your Web site, the number of interesting things that can be done with PHP is limited primarily by one’s imagination. To provide some stimulation on that end, Herrington has picked 100 nifty things you can do with PHP and brought them together in PHP Hacks from O’Reilly.

Like the other titles in the Hacks series, this book contains a smattering of just about everything, but treats the reader to just enough information about each topic to serve as a springboard for further exploration on your own. Although the code samples are quite generous (in many cases, they could be adapted to your own projects with minor alterations), they are clearly intended as a staring point, not as finished, production-ready scripts. In many cases, Herrington also provides well prepared UML diagrams to go along with the code samples, which provide an intuitive visual complement to the code itself.

Although there is certainly a lot of good information and inspirational value in the book’s first four chapters (Installation and Basics, Web Design, DHTML,and Graphics), in my view the really good material is in the last six chapters (Databases and XML, Application Design, Patterns, Testing, Alternative UIs, and Fun Stuff). The material in the chapter on design patterns, in particular, was excellent and would very likely challenge the skills of all but the most experienced PHP developers.

In some cases, though, the content of this book may be a little bit too close to the bleeding edge of what is possible with PHP. I could not help but notice that many of the hacks required PHP5 or the latest versions of Microsoft Office applications, whereas in many production environments (including this server, in fact), PHP4 is still widely used, and many office environments have more or less standardized on the features that were available in Office 2000.

Another thing that may surprise some readers is that, contrary to the regular “copy this code to your server and then load that page in your browser” technique used in many PHP books, many of the hacks in this book are actually designed to run from the command line, which some might find unusual for PHP, which is often thought of as simply an “HTML scripting language.” When shown the command line hacks—and the one for creating desktop applications in PHP—I think most readers will quickly realize that there is more to PHP than just Web pages.

Recommended for anyone who is interested in PHP, but needs a bit of a creative nudge to get started on some truly interesting projects.

Spurred in part by a generous donation from Zachary (who unfortunately seems to have abandoned his blog like yesterday’s dead fad), I’ve been on something of a Michael Crichton binge lately. 

First was State of Fear, which I wrote about once before, and that Zachary offered to send—and later did. I found myself somewhat disappointed to discover that it did not really have much influence on my thinking about the story’s central theme, that of global warming, but then I probably expected too much from this particular book (come to think of it, of all of Crichton’s work, only A Case of Need ever really influenced my thinking).

Crichton basically uses the global warming debate as a pretext for telling a an action/adventure story in which the protagonists get trapped in an icy crevasse in Antarctica and chased by cannibals on a tropical island—you know, the normal day-to-day activities of global warming critics. Although Crichton tells this story in about 600 printed pages, you cannot help but get the feeling that this is a story he really wanted to tell on the big screen.

Next came Airframe, which I enjoyed a lot, no doubt because, like the protagonist, I work in QA for a large company (although I’m not yet a VP—I’ll have to keep working on that). If you have any doubts about the safety of commercial air travel, this book will either assuage your fears by showing how much effort manufacturers put into ensuring your safety or push you over the edge by explaining how the fierce competition in the air travel industry cuts away at profit margins and puts constant pressure on critical things like maintenance.

Airframe was chased by Timeline, which I think was designed specifically to appeal to the inner Galahad in all of us. You may have some experience with extreme weather phenomena or even extreme turbulence, but extreme time travel is something that none of Crichton’s readers can relate to on a first-hand basis, so he gets to have a bit of fun with this one. Although the supporting characters come off as a bit two-dimensional, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable bit of fantasy physics.

These last two were picked up at a charity book fair at work, so my total outlay for these three books (thanks to Zachary’s generosity!) came to about 300 yen, which is next to nothing for books of this entertainment value. I started feeling a little bit guilty about reading several hundred pages of his work without contributing to Crichton’s financial well being, though; so when I spotted a copy of Prey at one of my few remaining local bookstores, I felt compelled to buy it. Now I’m living in fear of my kids developing a sudden, unexplainable rash…

In any case, I’ve gotten much, much more than my money’s worth out of Crichton novels lately, thanks in large part to book fairs. Speaking of which, there’s a good one coming up soon, so stop by if you have a chance (you could pick up some of the Crichton novels I’ll be donating!) or donate some books—because truly worthwhile books are too important not to share.

I’ve always been a big Michael Crichton fan, so I’m looking forward to reading his latest work, State of Fear, even though I find it rather difficult to buy into the premise (that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by radical environmentalists). 

It seems hard for me to believe that there can still be doubt about the reality of global warming when we regularly see news like this:

Countdown to global catastrophe

The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow - and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already.

The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world - and it is remarkably brief. In as little as 10 years, or even less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming may have been reached.

So which is it? Are we doomed or not? (Not that this will have much bearing on my enjoyment of Crichton’s book, mind you, but I would like to adjust my retirement plans accordingly.)

By the way, you know what I would really like from Amazon.com? A feature that would enable me to receive e-mail notification whenever a book I’m interested in becomes available in paperback. Although I really prefer hardcover books, they are much less practical to read on the train.