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Conan Doyle, Arthur - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File – FREE from Audible

Conan Doyle, Arthur – The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes – Free iTunes – Free MP3s

Conan Doyle, Arthur – The Return of Sherlock Holmes – Free iTunes - Free MP3s

Conan Doyle, Arthur - The Speckled Band – Free iTunes

Kipling, Rudyard – Just So Stories for Little Children – Free MP3 iTunes

Montgomery, Lucy Maud – Anne of Green Gables – Free iTunes – FREE from Audible

Henry, The Gift of the Magi – iTunes - Free MP3 – FREE from Audible

Poe, Edgar Allan - The Complete Stories – Free iTunes Free eBook available here.

Poe, Edgar Allan – The Cask of Amontillado – Free iTunes – FREE from Audible

Poe, Edgar Allen - The Raven (as read by Christopher Walken) – Free YouTube Audio

Poe, Edgar Allen - The Pit and the Pendulum – Free MP3 Poe, Edgar Allen – The Tell Tale Heart – Free MP3 – FREE from Audible

The true measure of a language isn’t how it uses semicolons; it’s the standard library of each language. A language is software for making software. The standard library is a set of premade software that you can reuse and reapply.

A coder needs to be able to quickly examine and identify which giant, complex library is the one that’s the most recently and actively updated and the best match for his or her current needs. A coder needs to be a good listener.

Code isn’t just obscure commands in a file. It requires you to have a map in your head, to know where the good libraries, the best documentation, and the most helpful message boards are located. If you don’t know where those things are, you will spend all of your time searching, instead of building cool new things.

Some tools are better for certain jobs.

C is a simple language, simple like a shotgun that can blow off your foot. It allows you to manage every last part of a computer—the memory, files, a hard drive—which is great if you’re meticulous and dangerous if you’re sloppy

Object-oriented programming is, at its essence, a filing system for code.

Where C tried to make it easier to do computer things, Smalltalk tried to make it easier to do human things.

Style and usage matter; sometimes programmers recommend Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style—that’s right, the one about the English language. Its focus on efficient usage resonates with programmers. The idiom of a language is part of its communal identity.

Coding is a culture of blurters.

Programmers carve out a sliver of cognitive territory for themselves and go to conferences, and yet they know their position is vulnerable.

Programmers are often angry because they’re often scared.

Programming is a task that rewards intense focus and can be done with a small group or even in isolation.

For a truly gifted programmer, writing code is a side effect of thought

As a class, programmers are easily bored, love novelty, and are obsessed with various forms of productivity enhancement.

“Most programming languages are partly a way of expressing things in terms of other things and partly a basic set of given things.”

Of course, while we were trying to build a bookstore, we actually built the death of bookstores—that seems to happen a lot in the business. You set out to do something cool and end up destroying lots of things that came before.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think, “Jesus Christ, how many more months do I have left?” or years, I hope. I am totally preoccupied with death. I mean my own death. Barth, for example, has said that he comes from very good stock and expects to live a long time. Bill Gass thinks that one of the reasons he takes so much time writing his novels—it took him ten years to write Omensetter’s Luck—is that he has an infinite amount of time left to him. I don’t believe that I have an infinite amount of time left to me. Probably I would be a healthier man if I did believe it.

making a scratch on a stone?

it’s not a question of making imaginary leaps or having a third eye. It’s a question of using the two eyes I have—and looking hard and close at things.

That kind of observation can be taught. I also try to teach them how to recognize a situation, what legitimately is a situation and what isn’t. Those are the only things that can be taught. I can’t teach a person style. I can’t teach him to write, in terms of language. But I can teach them that things look like other things.

Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, a collection of short stories (1966)

junk jewelry’s meteorological condition—its Fall line and Spring.

I don’t believe that less is more. I believe that more is more. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.

particular existential writers?

the SELF takes precedence.

Camus

in the better restaurants.

Barth is wonderful, but the Barth I really admire is back there in the Golden Age of Barth.

Bellow I think is a magnificent writer—probably, with Gass, the best writer in America.

I think Gass is the best word-man in America.

There’s marvelous language in Pricksongs and Descants but it’s subsidiary to the experiment with structure. I tell you this for your own good, Bob. The reason I like Gass so much is that Gass is not fucking around with structure. He is fucking around with language. That to me is legitimate and acceptable, and the furthest out you can go is the best place to be. That’s what’s so magnificent about Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote very conventional plays, but the language wasn’t conventional.

the great gift of fiction—is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

palimpsest of metaphor right there on the page. One gets a notion of the conceit and one is inspired to work with it as a draftsman might work with some angle that he is interested in getting down correctly.

Lori Gottlieb, writing in The Atlantic last year, claimed that child-rearing in the current generation has been excessively focused on preserving self-esteem.  As an illustration of one symptom of this, Gottlieb quoted clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel as saying that parents are actually relieved to be told that their struggling children are learning disabled, so that today "every child is either learning disabled, gifted, or both – there's no curve left, no average."  To claim a learning disability is the only way to set legitimate lower benchmarks for performance.  Kids are never just bad at anything anymore, because that's seen as being more harmful to self-esteem.

But my worries about the individual effects of the death of aptitude are dwarfed by my concern for its effect on the institutions of higher learning that those individuals are entering.  College is not a one-directional relationship of dispensing knowledge to young people.  The entire institution gains or loses value on the basis of what its students put into it.  By telling students with low aptitude and low interest that they can, should, and must strive to accomplish the same things as their higher-achieving peers, I fear that we're saturating higher education with people who subtract value from their institutions by committing minimum effort and lowering whatever curve still exists for the measurement of performance.

We all seem to agree that standards for college readiness need to improve, but you'll hear virtually no one asserting that when those standards are not met, the student ought to leave off college altogether, or to defer it until they have acquired, by sheer will or by natural intellectual growth, the aptitude to be successful at the proper level.  Indeed, just as common in criticism of education is the sentiment that we must see to it that more children enter and complete college.  But if those children don't have the aptitude to do so, the goal of improving college curriculum contradicts the goal of college-for-all.

We can't keep pretending that there is no such thing as aptitude and that every child has equal cause to vie for the topmost positions of intellectual esteem.  It does a disservice to the student and the school in kind.

Assessment Rubrics.