Reading like crazy

After the coding spree I mentioned in the last post, I seem to have switched gears and started an insane reading spree. Even by my standards, it's a bit of a record.

Here are the books I've been reading:

1. The last three books of Isaac Asimov's Robot saga, namely The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire.
   
2. One of Asimov's Empire series - Pebble in the Sky. I still have two more left - The Currents of Space and The Stars, Like Dust.
3. Four books from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga - Shards of Honor, Barrayar, The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game.
   

And let's not forget Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide. I haven't read all of this, but enough to build up some skill in the language. It's absolutely wonderful - I can see why Ruby programmers are such an ardent lot...

I'm thinking of rereading Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines. I loved it the first time I read it - always been a closet transhuman even before I knew what the term meant...

I'm stuck in section 3.2 at USACO. The first problem was fairly easy - minimum spanning trees, after all. The remaining three are still resisting my feeble attempts to solve them. I have an idea for one of them which I'll try out in a bit...

Junior Update: For those who came in late, Junior is the offspring of a certain female pigeon who took up residence outside my kitchen window a few weeks ago. He hatched a while back, and has been growing at a ferocious pace. He began to flap his wings a bit two days ago, but his parents don't seem very inclined to let him out of the nest, and defeat his efforts by the simple expedient of sitting on him(I kid you not). Maybe they're having trouble letting go of their only child, or they might be instinctively aware that it's too early, or some such thing...

I think I'll try out USACO now, and I've also had my eye on The Art of Java for a bit. The book contains, among other things, an implementation of a recursive descent parser. I've been thinking of reading up on it and then writing my own version, as a sort of guided exercise in good design. Maybe I'll take the Mentat approach this time, concentrating on the questions rather than the answers. Off I go...

PS: Happy New Year, world.