Author: Luiz A D R Marques

WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us, by Tim O'Reilly, is a book about how things are today, and how they can be, in several important areas.

It also has a lot of memories of the author in major events in technology, which I felt were quite interesting to read about (not sure how much interest younger people will have in those – being there probably makes a difference!).

There were a lot of important insights, that I wish leaders in all areas would read. I highlight every interesting idea I see, so in the end huge areas of the book were yellow.

I particularly like the reflections on why services like Uber work, and how we could make better regulations.

Overall, strongly recommended.

As usual (and since the author is the owner, not surprising) I read the book on Safari Books.

I've just read NeuroWisdom: The New Brain Science of Money, Happiness and Success, by Mark Robert Waldman and Chris Manning.

The book covers current neuroscience on how to be happier and more successful, usually with simple techniques you can use every day that were proven to work on actual research.

I can't say I got around to trying most of the ideas yet, but I certainly intend to, and several I have heard from several sources.

Overall, seems well worth the time reading and applying.

Read from Safari Books. Formatting was fine (I just saw a single book that had some formatting problems this year).

Update: It was removed from Safari.

Visual Studio 2015 Unleashed is a long book (1320 pages) that covers a lot of Visual Studio's capabilities and usage.

As you might expect, anything covering the whole surface of a system as large as VS must be shallow at places. Nevertheless, I feel that is well enough to give an useful overview of many of the technologies involved, such as WinForms, WPF, UWP, Apache Cordova, Xamarin, creating Office add-ins, writing VS extensions and many more.

Obviously it doesn't cover the latest version (2017) but most of the changes are not important enough to matter.

WPF 4.5 Unleashed – by Adam Nathan – covers WPF, the desktop system that was preferred by Microsoft till Windows Store Apps/UWP.

Unfortunately, while these are close the apps have several annoying limitations compared to WPF.

I really enjoyed reading the book and learning about WPF, which has some fantastic features. It is sad that it seems to have been abandoned by MS in favor of UWP. But apps stores do have some conceptual advantages, and a lot of people that didn't consider it convenient to buy PC apps directly from seller prefer to buy MS (at least in theory – the older Mac app store had lot of developers dropping out because of problems, including the inflexibility of upgrade systems).

It'd be nice if UWP was more universal, and followed .NET core into more platforms. I'm not holding my breath for this though – it'd be a major project. I guess Xamarin.Forms and others will have to do for now.

Overall, I'd strongly recommend the book for people who want to learn about WPF. But keep in mind that some of it (not all as UWP is somewhat close) may be a waste of time…