Book Review: John Grisham's Camino Island

Camino Island by John Grisham is my least favorite of his books so far. While the first two I read, A Time to Kill and A Time for Mercy followed Jake Brigance’s law practice, Camino Island follows a main character Mercer in a much less anxious plot. As an aside, near Seattle there is a Camano Island, Mercer Island, and Mercer street, so I was surprised when the book did not take place in Washington.
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Book Review: A Time for Mercy by John Grisham

I’ve just finished A Time for Mercy by John Grisham. This is the second novel I’ve read by him, the first being A Time to Kill. This novel, as with the first, catered to my taste for drama. Uniquely, I like suspenseful plots, but too much suspense or grit can cause me to put a book down. In the case of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, him graphically killing off the main party’s small animal companion caused me to put down the book entirely.
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Teaching Computational Thought

Teaching Computational Thought Learning how to program, or the general computational thought process that comes along with programming and computer science, is difficult. When learning, there is a clear partition of those who “can” and those, like yourself, who “cannot”. On occasion, you can even observe your fellow students transition from one side of this binary categorization to the other seemingly easily. They acquire some intuition that you simply are not arriving at, no matter how much you study the material and pay attention in class.
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The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold

The Annotated Turing is a book by Charles Petzold, which I picked up a few years back when I was going through a theory class and wanted some extracurricular reading. As with many attempted extracurriculars, this did not happen that semester, nor the next, nor at all during my education. As the book had finished its proper incubation period last week, I finally read it. I’ve collected some thoughts on it here.
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Choosing the Right Tool for the Job

Programming languages, and to a lesser extent software technologies in general, have an annoying tendency to polarize and fanaticize fanbases. Inherent in tauting benefits and advantages over other systems is implicit disapproval of systems which do not uphold the same standard or principle. This trend almost definitely exists beyond my field of software, but from my narrow world view, and especially as a Rust programmer, I can only observe it in this context.
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