Book-Review

Over the years, I’ve read quite a number of marketing books. Today, I finished reading Confessions of a Persuasion Hitman by Ian Stanley.

Content

I’ll start by saying that the title nearly put me off. It seemed a pretty cheesy title and it’s the sort of book that I’d normally avoid. In the end though, I’m glad that I read it.

It’s not a long book. My paperback copy only had about 130 pages. I didn’t love the print quality. It seemed to have pretty low-quality paper and there were places were I found a paragraph break in the middle of a sentence. I presume it’s been designed for eBook use and just has a print-on-demand option availble. Sometimes they don’t fit printed copies well. But the quality was acceptable.

2026-09-23

Time to read

I was on a flight from Houston to Washington via Dallas a while back. We seemed to sit forever on the tarmac in Dallas, in fact just over 1.5 hours from leaving gate to taking off. It was amazingly silly. We were 18th in the takeoff queue and the airport required the planes to keep turning their engines off after moving each time. The captain (who was clearly fed up) warned us that if he had to stop and restart the engines one more time, we’d have had to return to the terminal for more fuel. And we hadn’t even left Houston.

2026-09-13

I recently read the 2nd edition of a book on serverless ETL. Serverless ETL and Analytics with AWS Glue (2nd Edition) . I hadn’t had the chance to read the first edition of this book, but my friends at PackT sent me the 2nd edition to check out.

Authors

Noritaka Sekiyama is a big data engineer working at a data and AI company.

Albert Quiroga is a senior solutions architect at Amazon.

2026-09-05

I recently listened (via Audibla) to Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century . I wasn’t sure what I’d make of it but I’d heard it was interesting, and I noticed that on a show led by Rachel Maddow.

Author

Timothy Snyder is a well-known author, historian and intellectual. He’s an expert on eastern Europe and on the Second World War.

On Tyranny

I decided to go through this book for two reasons. I was fascinated by his thoughts on tyranny, and I liked the fact that it was a short book. I’m also a fan of books that are narrated by their authors, and Snyder is the narrator for this book.

2026-09-01

I recently mentioned that I’ve spent some time lately reading some older and more famous books. I’m particularly keen to re-read books that I remember strongly from when I was young. I love John Steinkbeck’s books and Of Mice and Men particularly stuck in my mind.

Author

John Steinbeck was an American writer and novelist who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature for his realistic and imaginative writings. I’ve read many of his books and have loved them.

2026-08-30

I’ve spent some time lately reading some older and more famous books. One that seemed fascinating was a short story by James Joyce called The Dead .

Author

James Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet. He was also well-known as a literary critic. Wikipedia says he is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. I’ve spent time in Ireland over the years, and I’ve seen a lot of tributes to him both up in Dublin, and also around Kildare. He’s treated as somewhat of a national treasure.

2026-08-20

I recently received a review copy of Causal Inference with Bayesian Networks by Yousri El Fattah and Reza Bagheri from my friends at PackT.

Authors

Yousri El Fattah is the CEO of Causal Computing and an expert in machine intelligence, causal modelling, control systems engineering, and data science.

Reza Bagheri is a working data scientist at Ipsos. He has written extensively on data science and machine learning, and has spoken at substantial conferences.

2026-08-14

I recently received a review copy of Python for Algorithmic Trading Cookbook (2nd Edition): Recipes for designing, building, and deploying algorithmic trading strategies with Python by Jason Strimpel from my friends at PackT.

Author

Jason Strimpel is the founder of PyQuant News, co-founder of Quant Science, and Managing Director of Global AI and Advanced Analytics at a top-tier consulting firm.

Content

This book is an ambitious, highly practical guide to building the complete research-to-execution workflow for systematic trading. It treats algorithmic trading as an engineering discipline involving data acquisition, storage, analysis, backtesting, risk measurement, execution, and deployment. I was surprised by the breadth of modern tools that are discussed: 68 recipes, 51 Jupyter notebooks, 17 modular trading applications, and four GPU-focused scripts.

2026-08-08

I recently received a review copy of The Orange Book of Machine Learning: Green Edition by Carl McBride Ellis from my friends at PackT.

Author

Carl McBride Ellis wrote this book as a Green Edition of the material he had been teaching across a whole range of Spanish cities.

Content

This is the sort of technical book that feels less like a formal textbook and more like spending a few very productive days with an experienced instructor. That makes sense: the book grew out of a five-day course, and its examples are built around Python, pandas, scikit-learn and Jupyter notebooks. The result is practical, opinionated and surprisingly personable. The language is quite precise but a little less conversational than I would have liked. It’s very to the point.

2026-07-31

I recently received a review copy of Python Data Analysis: Master Python Analytics with Machine Learning, Deep Learning, GenAI, LLMs, and Data Engineering by Avinash Navlani and Cornellius Yudha Wijaya from my friends at PackT. This is the fourth edition of this book.

Authors

Avinash Navlani is a senior data scientist, researcher, and educator with a PhD in data science and many years in both the industry and in academia.

Cornellius Yudha Wijaya is a data science manager leading AI initiatives and driving the development of practical data and AI solutions.

2026-07-21