In an effort (I assume) to keep Amazon from completely destroying every brick and mortar book store on Earth, Borders actually dishes out some decent coupons (30% – 40% off a single title) to their reward club members. This is probably the most affordable way to pick up a brand new hardcover Knuth set if you’re so inclined.
Border’s is one of three places I normally buy books. The second is Amazon. The third is directly from Oreilly’s website. I’ve bought six e-books from Oreilly in the last 15 months and they were all 40% off (using the same coupon). This is either an extremely long running promotion…or one of their web developers needs to update whatever db table the coupons live in. 
I haven’t been able to sleep the last few nights (tonight now included), so I decided to grab a new book to read in the hopes it would either knock me out cold or actually teach me something. I picked up iPhone Game Development for about $17 after discount.
I’m barely into the second chapter and the authors are discussing an OOP approach to designing a state machine. After the initial explanation and some sample code there’s a boxed series of paragraphs with the title “The Next Level: Concurrent Access” on page 41, which basically tries to make an argument against developing multi-threaded state managers on a single processor platform like the iPhone. This little nugget from the third paragraph gave me a bit of pause:
Furthermore, there is less to be gained from multithreaded processes on the iPhone because filesystem access is much faster due to the hard drive being much smaller in capacity and responding to only one application at a time.
A couple quick questions off the top of my head:
- Where is the “hard drive” kept in the iPhone? Perhaps it’s a fancy new addon I don’t know about.
- WTF does the capacity of this mystical drive have to do with its access time?
I realize that writing an entire post about this seems…well…strange to say the least, but I was really looking forward to reading the rest of this book. Now I’m a bit skeptical.
