I bought “Patterns of Enterprise Architecture” while shopping at Borders today. I’ve been meaning to purchase the Martin Fowler book for a while, but never quite managed to add it to my Amazon.com shopping cart. Just flipping through the pages, I realised just how much this book has influenced the design or patterns I had only just discovered 2-3 years ago. This includes popular ORM patterns such as ActiveRecord and DataMapper. ActiveRecord, powers Rails & DataMapper which integrates nicely with Merb. While it is true that Ruby really brought these patterns to life, Martin includes comprehensive examples in both Java and C#. I hope to explore the additional ORM patterns …

Programming Collective Intelligence is my “must have” book for 2007. I’ve been looking for a book that was able to explain machine learning, data mining and the related mathematics. I think I’ve found it! This book seems to cover just about everything including:

• Recommendations (Collaborative and Item based filtering)
• Supervised and Unsupervised Learning
• Clustering
• Searching and Ranking
• Decision Trees
• Kernel Methods and Support Vector Machines (SVM)
• Genetic Programming

I hope I finally understand the maths behind SVMs. I’m off to order the book. I’ll post a review soon…..

Wicked Cool Java does a great job at showcasing Java and many open source Java libraries. There is no need to be affraid when I mention Java libraries. Libraries are quite distinct from Frameworks. Wicked Cool Java is a framework free zone ie no overly complex web frameworks. Only “cool Java” examples are included in the areas of the semantic web, science, maths, graphics, data visualization and multimedia. Wicked Cool Java is well written, includes simple illustrative examples and with just 200 pages totally restores the faith in Java. I’ve had such fun building a Genetic algorithm (JGAP), Neural Network (Joone), Network Visualization (JGraph & JGraphT) and a zoomable GUI (Piccolo).