31 books like The School in the Cloud

Ron Berger is a global treasure in the field of education. He is the guiding spirit behind the remarkable EL Education schools – they used to be called Expeditionary Learning schools – in the USA. An Ethic of Excellence was the first book of Ron’s I encountered, and it blew me away. With years of hard-won experience, he has learned that all students, give the right kind of support, are capable of producing genuinely high-quality work, and he knows how to teach in a way that makes that possibility a reality. Ron says, “when we are grown up, we won’t be judged by our test scores, but by the quality of both our character and our work”, and he gets students ready for that world. His schools get all their students to good colleges, and they get good degrees. The quality of Ron’s work is truly inspiring.

This marvelous little book was first published in 1939 – and it is still bang up to date in its critique of conventional education. (As a society we seem to have learned far too little in the ensuing 80 years). Peddiwell tells the story of the first pre-historic educators who taught young people useful life skills like how to grab fish, or how to use fire to scare away saber-tooth tigers. Over the years the climate changed, but the elders refused to allow the curriculum to change with it. The saber-tooth tigers died out, but scaring them still had to be taught in schools because that knowledge had become a ‘cultural treasure’ even though it was now useless. It is very funny, and bang on the money, in showing just how stupid supposedly clever people can be. (Peddiwell and his story were both made up by a real professor called… show more.

Perkins, like Mitra and Berger, is on my list of top educational gurus. All his books are worth reading, but Future Wise is one of the latest and best. It takes a long careful look at the contents of the conventional school curriculum, compares it with the real-world challenges that today’s kids will meet, and finds it seriously lacking as a preparation for real life. He goes on to explore the wealth of current knowledge that isn’t in the curriculum but ought to be, and demonstrates the kind of careful, creative thinking about education that ought to be happening but rarely is – certainly not by most academics and politicians. David is a Harvard professor, and is, as you would expect, deeply thoughtful and fair-minded, but he writes with a down-to-earth elegance and charm that makes his penetrating questioning all the more convincing.

Postman is another of my heroes, not least because – like Perkins – of the quality of his thinking and writing. Again, all his books are a pleasure to read – right back to one I read as a young lecturer in the early 1970s called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. The pun in his title is deliberate and speaks to the heart of his argument: that if we do not rediscover a coherent and compelling end – i.e. purpose – for education, it will probably, and deservedly, be the end of education as we know it. Postman explores five possible narratives that could be compelling enough to revive young people’s interest and faith in their school. Again, like Perkins, he does not end by giving us an easy answer, but boy, does he make you think about what might be possible. A true visionary, with his feet firmly on… show more.

This anthology holds a special place in my heart. I received a copy of it as a Christmas present from my dear grandmother in 1979. Just holding it in my hands brings back so many happy memories of that long-departed lady. The book contains just eleven stories, but it is “a collection of deliciously scary fare.” Among the choice delicacies contained within its covers is the shortened version of A Christmas Carol made by Dickens for his public readings of the story, which I read in his imagined voice. Alongside anthology favourites by Hugh Walpole, Algenon Blackwood, and Jerome K. Jerome are less familiar, but equally rewarding ghostly tales by Marjorie Bowen, Oliver Onions, Margery Allingham, and others. I don’t know if it is still in print, but anyone who takes the trouble to find a copy will be richly rewarded. 

Understanding how requests and messages traverse a large microservice landscape is notoriously challenging. The CNCF OpenTelemetry framework standardizes how to collect and observe telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces).

This book was invaluable in helping me grasp OpenTelemetry’s core concepts and architecture, including collectors and exporters, and how to instrument applications effectively. It also helped me understand how distributed tracing data is structured into traces and spans and how to propagate context information between cooperating microservices.

This book contains many practical examples of solving common programming tasks using Clojure, and it's an excellent choice for a practical Clojure reference.

Developers who are new to the functional programming style will find a lot of useful patterns for solving problems using idiomatic Clojure style. The book is an essential reference for Clojure developers.

This is a book for practitioners, by a practitioner, full of practical learnings that I was able to start using in my work immediately.

I especially appreciated the parts teaching the core principles of infrastructure as code (e.g., systems are disposable, consistent, can easily be reproduced, etc.), core practices of infrastructure as code (e.g., use definition files, self-documented systems and processes, version all the things, etc.), and the idea of antifragile systems (rather than just systems that you prevent from breaking) and autonomic systems (rather than just automated systems).

While the term the “Metaverse” usually makes people think of a fully digital, immersive world, my own feeling is that technologies that bring digital information and entertainment into our physical world is a much more powerful and important arena. This leads us to the transformative and still-developing world of Augmented Reality.

David Rose of the MIT Media Lab has been working with Augmented Reality for more than a decade, and Supersight is an overview of what he's seen and what he’s learned in this time. 

What I love about Supersight is that while David is clearly as excited about this topic as I am, he’s also a realist, and openly discusses issues and challenges with Augmented Reality. Perhaps most valuable are the 14 Augmented Reality Design Principles that he outlines – super realistic, super useful.

After reading this, you’ll have a very grounded idea of the capabilities and potential of… show more.

In industry, your data is very likely to live within a data warehouse such as BigQuery, Redshift, or Snowflake. Therefore, to be an effective data scientist in the industry, you should learn how to use data warehouses effectively. 

Once you learn data warehousing and SQL with any one of these products, it is quite easy to pick up another. So which one do you start with?

You can use Snowflake on all three of the major public clouds. Because it’s a standalone product, it is the most similar to a “traditional” data warehouse and can be picked up easily even if you are not familiar with cloud computing. That makes it a good data warehouse to start with, and is the reason my second book pick is this book on Snowflake.

BigQuery is also available on all three major public clouds, but it works best (and is used most commonly)… show more.