I am new to MongoDB but this book has been helpful in evaluating and learning about how to scale with it. At work we’ve been thinking about using it for some projects but it was important to investigate and review it in more detail before we jumped into it and added it to our stack. Overall, it’s a great book on Mongo scaling, succinct and complete. It doesn’t elaborate on every possible scaling topic, but it’s enough detail to make important architectural decisions. Mongo is a great new technology, and this book is a good companion. For more info on using mongo in general, check out “MongoDB: The Definitive Guide.”

Some great organic bitters.

Ok, I think I have seen everything now. There is a new cologne called Bacon, which of course smells like fried pork flesh. http://www.fargginay.com/shop-1.html

I was at Sephora the other day with my girlfriend and I didn’t find any on their shelves. They could be missing out on a goldmine 🙂

Python is a great language for writing scripts that can be easily ran on servers or for writing web and desktop apps.  This book helps guide you through the syntax and coding style that make up a python app.  It’s definitely one of the more flexible and easy to use modern languages.

One more day left in the O’Reilly blogger review program.  This time I have been looking at The Art of Community by Jono Bacon.

Overall it’s a great book for a foundation in community building and growing social websites.  It’s filled with lots of good advice and common sense.  My main complaint is I wish there were more stories.  You can’t always expect the author to be authoritative on every topic, as a reader you want more anecdotes and support for why you should take the authors advice.  It may not be a good fit for seasoned community managers, but it’s a great volume for programmers, project managers and young community managers.  It’s well worth a read.

I’ve been reviewing O’Reilly publications all week. I got ahold of Make Magazine: DIY Music (Technology on Your Time Volume #15) this time. It was fun reading about the various music hacks, brought me back to my hardware hacking days of undergrad and more recently Dartmouth Digital Musics.