This line from the preface sums up the book:

> The history of Pi is a quaint little mirror of the history of men

This is a short book, not very hard to read (though sometimes heavy on the math). It gives a very cursory overview of the history of mankind using the evolution of Pi as a pretext. The author is opinionated, which makes the book fun to read in parts. In particular, the chapters dealing with ancient civilizations, the greeks and the romans are very interesting to read.

So nothing really earth shattering. But if you like some math, and you like some history, then you might want to check this book out.

I don’t remember where I heard about Coding Slave first. But sometime during the summers, I printed the book out (yes, its freely downloadable as a PDF) for future reading. Days went by and I didn’t get a chance to get back to it. Finally I got around to reading it on my flight back from SOSP.

Coding Slave is a book about people in the IT industry. About people who code. It tells a story which interleaves across several characters, with a central, underlying theme.

I have mixed feelings for the book. It doesn’t begin very impressively. It starts off too conventionally, the language seems artificial, the words contrived. Of course given the time frame it was written in, probably it was more fitting back when the IT industry and the whole Internet-boom thing were running high. The book shines in some places though. I really liked some of the parts at the end, particular the final speech by Ajita. Some passages are much more meaningful and in-depth than the rest of the book.

All in all I think its an interesting book, and definitely airplane material.