Skip to main content

Bits to Bitcoin - Mark Stuart Day ***

When I saw the title of this book, I got all excited - at last we were going to get an explanation of bitcoin for the rest of us, who struggle to understand what the heck it really involves. There certainly is an explanation of bitcoin, but it comes in chapter 26 - in practice, the book contains far more. Almost every popular computer science title I've read has effectively been history of computer science - this is one of the first examples I've ever come across that is actually trying to make the 'science' part of computer science accessible to the general reader.

 I don't mean by this that it's an equivalent of Programming for Dummies. Instead, Bits to Bitcoin takes the reader through the concepts lying behind programming. If we think of programming as engineering, this is the physics that the engineering depends on. This is a really interesting proposition. Many years ago, I was a professional programmer, but I never studied computer science, so I was only familiar with the practical part, rather than the theory. And there's no doubt that I learned quite a lot, but it was distinctly hard work to do so.

 There are two problems here. One is that Mark Stuart Day is determined not to use code in examples, as he believes that it will scare off ordinary readers. So instead he uses analogies, some of which are so stretched that it's really difficult to follow what's going on - it would have been far simpler to have used actual examples from computing. I'm really not sure that the 'no code' approach works, because frankly, if you're prepared to put in the considerable effort required to work your way through this book, you wouldn't be scared of a little simple code.

 The second issue is that this really is a textbook with some of the sharp edges rubbed off. There's no context, no narrative, no people - nothing but fact after fact. Again, this makes reading the book much more like hard work than it needs to be. As I've already mentioned, that's not to say that you won't learn quite a lot if you make the effort - but things don't have to be like this. And the constant abstraction from actual code or hardware detail makes it more of a struggle to get through. This comes across particularly when Day gets on to the internet, where there pretty much has to be more specifics, and suddenly things get a touch more readable.

 As far as bitcoin goes, I'm still waiting for an explanation of it that is comprehensible to the general reader. Again, Day does give us plenty of information, but it's not put across in a usefully comprehensible way. I was pleased to see, though, that he does address the issue that has recently been in the news that bitcoin mining is currently resulting in a lot of dirty energy being used.

 Overall, then, the intention of this book is brilliant - it's supposed to be proper popular computer science. It's just the execution of that intent that makes reading it a lot harder work than it should be.

Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on
Post a Comment
Read more

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question.  Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book
Post a Comment
Read more