At long last I managed to finish The Second World War which has been holding up my reading list for the last few months. Here's a few reviews of what I've been reading over the last few months.

• The Second World War by Antony Beevor - Without doubt this is the most complete and detailed account of the Second World War that you will find on any bookshelf. The bibliography alone takes up the last quarter of the book with supporting material from other books as well as journals of military personnel and civilians providing eye witness accounts of events. The book covers all the critical events from the leading up to the start of WWII until it's final days when Japan surrendered to the US. It seems wrong to say that I enjoyed this book given the topic, but I did. It was a learning experience for me. A chance to find out everything I didn't know about the Second World War. There were parts of the book that I found troubling to read, but the incidents that the book highlighted only re-inforce the human cost of war and why it should be avoided at all costs.
• Inferno by Dan Brown - Dan Brown's books sometimes receives unfair criticism that they are not of the same calibre as other great fictional books but I've never found that. I enjoyed this book. Another outing for the Harvard symbologist. It was a good read and it kept me turning pages right to the end. One concern I have though for these books are their duration. Like the Chase / Wilde series by Andy McDermott, I'm starting to see a repeating pattern in the adventures of Langdon as he hops across the world, interpreting symbols and saving the world. I don't think there's much mileage left in these books if Brown decides to write more of them, but I still found this book enjoyable.
• The City by Stella Gemmell - I wanted to love this book so much as I thought that it being from someone who was close to David Gemmell when he was alive, it might have some influences from him. I started the book with enthusiasm but it quickly wained over the course of the first sixty pages. I found it to be slow with no sign of picking up. After sixty pages I eventually gave up and moved on to something else.
• Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck & Cynthia Andres - It's been on the reading list for a while, but it's taken me to now to read it thanks to a prompt by another developer on App.net who mentioned he was reading it to get back to the basics of extreme programming again. The ideas and practices that I learned from this book just back up for me how important agile practices are to software development. A must read for any software developer whether they are starting their career or want to re-kindle those basics of good software development practices again.