I’ve recently received review copies of a couple of new books. Here are the reviews of those books that I have submitted to Amazon.

Designing the Internet of Things – Adrian McEwen & Hakim Cassimally (Wiley)

I’ve been hearing people talking about “the internet of things” for a few years now. And I’ve always meant to find out what they meant by the term. Well now, thanks to this book, I have a really good idea. I might even think about building something for the internet of things myself (you know, in my copious free time!)

Adrian and Hakim obviously know what they are talking about. They both have experience of working on these kinds of projects. And, crucially, they also have the writing skills to pass their expertise on to the reader.

Some of the stuff in the earlier chapters, I already knew. But things like an introduction to TCP/IP and networking will be useful to many people who don’t have such a technical background. Software, I can do – it was the chapters about hardware that I found most useful. I now know far more than I did about the different toolkits that are available for building internet-connected devices.

Part I is about prototyping your device and part 2 is about building it. I’m sure that other books cover these topics – although, perhaps, not in the focused way that this book does. But it’s part 3 where this book really shines. These three chapters cover business models, scaling your manufacturing process and some of the ethical issues that these devices raise. This section really makes the book a “one-stop shop” for finding all the information you’ll need to take your vague idea to a complete product and (hopefully) a profitable company.

Perl One-Liners – Peteris Krumins (No Starch)

Perl one-liners are an important part of its power and flexibility. The ability to process a file quickly without having to write a program is often really useful. Any Perl programmers should take the time to get to know the command like switches that make this possible. This book is a pretty good introduction to this way of using Perl.

So why only three stars? Well, I have a couple of reservations about the book. Firstly, there are a few technical errors which the editors should have caught. For example, a few times the author refers to “array context” where he means “list context”. The difference between arrays and lists is often difficult for beginners to master and it doesn’t help when books blur the distinction.

My other reservation is with the programs themselves. The book boasts “130 programs that get things done”. But I think they have had to stretch things a bit to get to that number. One program might be “print lines that match a pattern”. Then the next program will be “print lines that don’t match a pattern”. I’m not sure that inverting the logic in a one-liner is enough of a difference to justify counting it separately. Sometimes you’ll come across two or three pages of examples all of which are only tiny permutations of each other.

But it’s good to see publishers bringing out books on Perl. And this is certainly an area of Perl that hasn’t received much coverage before. I just think it’s a rather thin concept to spin out to a book. Even this stretched, it’s a rather thin book (140 pages – 50 of which are appendices). It might have been better as a cheap Kindle-only publication.