Mind Performance Hacks

Another book in O'Reilly's hacks series was published last month: Mind Performance Hacks gives some hacks for the scatter-brain. There is also a wiki to support the book that is worth at least a quick read.

I was beginning to think the word hacking was lost to the world of subverting computer systems. O'Reilly's hacker series does a lot to put the idea of hacking back where it was--- the combination of art and science to make something new. Mind Performance Hacks is true to its title. It reminds me of John Bentley's programming pearls articles. Some hacks fit right into an engineer’s day; Estimating Orders of Magnitude is one. Perl programmers will find this book interesting too: where there is code it is Perl. Which is fitting, some of the memory aid devices in the book were used by Larry in the early days of Perl in explaining the language to Shell or C programmers.