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"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that every interstellar colony in search of good fortune must be in need of a banker."

And this book is all about banking, economics, and fraud. In this particular book, for example, interstellar trade is only possible through Bitcoin, and faster than light travel is impossible. There were some sections in the book which made me wonder how on earth civilizations persisted for the duration necessary to make physical travel worth it -- but then again, it's got humanoid robots and a distinctly human appetite for entertainment and distraction, so how realistic can it be?

The bigger story always comes about through the world building, and in this sense it's like Bank's Culture -- a theoretically honest and clean technologically advanced world that quickly shows the dirt, corruption and deal haggling that goes on underneath.

The ending is abrupt, but that's not why I read Stross. There is clearly more work put into it than has gone into the Merchant Princes, and it's intriguing on its merits. I can't tell you if I'll remember anything about the plot.

Quotes!

Once a year on my stabbiversary, I remind myself that this is still my bonus life, a round on the house.

I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.

The goal of a life is not to provide material for good stories.

Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn’t this happen every day?

I have loved women who were saner and kinder than me , for whom I became the best version of myself. But it’s also a relief to be with someone who’s not better than you, who’s just as bad and likes it. With these women , I didn’t have to impersonate a better person than myself; we were complicit, accomplices.

I don’t feel middle-aged— I just feel like I’ve been young a lot longer than most people.

Eventually a day comes when the lined, puffy, sagging face you see the mirror when you’re hung over does not go away, and you realize that it is now your actual face.

What someone’s lies reveal about them (aspirations to being an accomplished writer, fantasies of an exotic history and a cosmopolitan family ) are always sadder than the fact of the lies themselves.

The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.

Most people are just too self-absorbed, well -meaning, and lazy to bother orchestrating Machiavellian plans to slight or insult us.

But outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out.

We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again, like compulsive masturbation.

What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people.

America is, after all, the most powerful military empire in the history of the planet; we spend the equivalent of most countries ’ GNP each year maintaining an armada of battleships the size of cities, a fleet of radar-invisible supersonic bombers, and enough nuclear weapons to denude the entire biosphere of the earth, and still we need to root for ourselves?

I was starting to remember the whole problem now: I hate these fucking people.

The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts.

The obvious impossibility of this plan illuminates something about the nature of friendship and its limits; after sixth grade, you simply aren’t allowed to ask questions like, “Okay, Harlan, how come don’t you like me no more?”

he said, “Aw, you’re gonna find happiness, and I’ll be left Ironing the Pants of Despair.” I was touched by how openly he admitted that he didn’t want me to be happy.

The biggest oil reserves on earth have been tapped; no significant new ones are being discovered. The most accessible and chilling analogy I’ve heard is that the situation is like being at a party where there’s only one six-pack, we’ve already drunk four of the six beers, and it’s after closing time.

The last and saddest lesson I learned from him is that most of us are motivated not by reason or even self-interest, but something more like middle school politics. In making up my own mind on the issue of peak oil, the most relevant question turned out to be not Does the evidence support this theory? or even Is Ken trustworthy? but Would I rather live in the peak-oil compound with Ken or die in the food riots with Harold? Harold and I have made our choice, if only by default; we’ve cast our fate with the doomed. He and I have agreed that, while our fellow Americans are looting Costco and we’re barricaded in our favorite Baltimore bar, we’re going to call Ken up and demand: Why didn’t you warn us? It ought to be worth one last laugh. Maybe the vindication of apocalypse will have put him in a mellow and generous enough mood that even Ken will see the funny side.

My policy has always been, when someone asks you if you will travel to Wisconsin to nurse them through sex change surgery, to say yes.

The longer you live, the more involuted and unique all your friendships become, until each is as exotic and alien from the others as creatures on widely divergent evolutionary branches, bearing as much resemblance to one another as a lightning whelk and a gnu.

It’s as if, if we all had to stand still and shut up and turn off our machines for one minute, we’d hear the time passing and just start screaming.

Was it terror, or was it love? It would be a long time before Ann LeSage could decide. For most of her life, the two feelings were so similar as to be indistinguishable. It was easy to mix them up.

That's the thesis of The Geisters, and for most of the book, it slides a razor's edge between the two. On one side, there's Ann -- alone, confused and racked with guilt after an accident that resulted in her brother's crippling and her parents death. About to get married to a man, for love. And then there's the Insect, an invisible force that has followed and tormented Ann for as long as she can remember.

The 'Geisters is a conventional book in some ways -- it doesn't use fancy language, it doesn't confuse. At the same time, it's an alien experience. David Nickle is very good at framing her experience in the form of available options, and the options that Ann thinks she has are... well, Ann tries very hard to control her thoughts and how she thinks about things.

The larger issue for me is the Insect. Why did it kill her parents? Even if it loved Phillip, why did it cripple him so severely -- was all just to kill Laurie, who was in the same car? Then why did the Insect let Ann get acute hypothermia? What was the motivation for wrecking the boat? Why did the Insect kill Peter Dumont (was it to kill Mr Sleepy?) and why did the Geisters not run like buggery when that happened? Are they that addicted to terror that they can't turn away from it? And what makes Ann disappear into the room in the Octogon? How did they condition the Incest when the only real contact they had was with Sunderland when she was a child? Why did Ann stay in the tower of the Arch-Liche? Despite taking days in the tower, Sunderland had just dropped her off at the conference center when she escapes, and Ann herself refers to "earlier that morning", but even so the time dilation is odd. And I'm still not sure about what the relationship between Susan and Little is like -- she's not "eaten" so much as distracted, with most of her mental energy being focused outside her body. And Ann's ability to kill (and total lack of empathy for Lily, the 8 year old girl trapped at the bottom of a hole with no poltergeist protecting her) is seems curiously soulless and empty -- there's no rage or joy there, and so it seems like the result of the merging is less, rather than more.

But in spite of that -- it doesn't have to make sense. It's a great book, and a good horror story, and worth reading.

I got this as a Kindle edition, but there is no Kindle edition, so Hardcover will have to do. EDIT: I bought the hardcover as well as the Kindle edition. I'm going to be using this book LOTS.

This is an incredibly comprehensive and complete book. It takes Eric Evan's "Domain Driven Design" and roughly two hundred different blog posts, example projects and community thinking and tries to condense them into a single book.

As such, it goes over DDD from a "what are we doing" requirements perspective to a very detailed CQRS implementation, complete with event sourcing. It references every single blog post I've ever heard about the subject and many I haven't, and tries to put it in the context of a single company. The sheer amount of work and editing for this book must have been staggering -- even if you know DDD backwards and forwards, accumulating and presenting that information is not at all easy to do.

Especially for newer topics, this book excels. It goes into detail on specialized cases like using datafabric / grid computing for retrieving the state of event source aggregates, using snapshot events, or using Mule's collection aggregator.

Where it really falls over is the humor. You just can't make mock popular culture radio interviews about DDD funny. Likewise, the two cowboys trading bon-mots falls completely flat.

Still, totally worth it, and I find the other reviews that badmouth this book and then push another book "helpfully linked" to be at best dishonest, if not Complete Bullshit.

Quotes!

Simply stated, practicing DDD-Lite leads to the construction of inferior domain models.

The whole Domain of the organization is composed of Subdomains. Using DDD, models are developed in Bounded Contexts.

When we employ DDD, we strive for each Bounded Context to mark off where the meaning of every term used by the domain model is well understood, or at least should be if we’ve done a good job of modeling the software. It’s chiefly a linguistic boundary. These contextual boundaries are a key to implementing DDD.

For example, the term Customer must have multiple meanings. When a user is browsing the Catalog, Customer means one thing, but when a user is placing an Order, it means something else. Here’s why. When browsing the Catalog, Customer is being used in the context of previous purchases, loyalty, available products, discounts, and shipping options. On the Order itself, however, Customer has a limited meaning. Among the few details there is a name with a ship-to address, a bill-to address, a total due, and payment terms. Just by this basic reasoning we see that in the e-Commerce System there is no one clean meaning for Customer. Given this situation, as we look around that system we would expect to find several other terms that have multiple meanings. It’s not a clean Bounded Context with an explicit meaning for each term naming a domain concept.

CQRS is meant to solve a specific view sophistication problem, not to tack on as a cool new style that will strengthen your résumé.

It’s worth noting that CQRS-based views can be both cheap and disposable (for development and in maintenance). This is especially so if you use a simple form of Event Sourcing (see the section “Event Sourcing” later in the chapter and Appendix A) and save all Events into a persistent store, which can be republished at any time to create new persistent view data. Doing so, any single view could be rewritten from scratch in isolation or the entire query model be switched to completely different persistence technology. This makes it easy to create and maintain views that continuously address ongoing UI needs. This can lead to more intuitive user experiences that avoid the table paradigm but are instead much richer.

Each command is sent as an asynchronous message and delivered to a handler designed with the dedicated style. This not only enables each command processor component to receive specifically typed messages, but processors of a given type can be added to deal with command processing load. This approach should not be used by default, as it has a more complex design.

Unless Event logging is a requirement specified by the business, the command model can be persisted using an object-relational mapper (ORM) to a relational database or some other approach.

We can produce domain models that publish Domain Events without the need to support Event Sourcing. As a persistence mechanism, Event Sourcing replaces and is far different from using an ORM tool. Because Events are often persisted in an Event Store as binary representations, they cannot (optimally) be used for queries. In fact, Repositories designed for an Event Sourcing model require only a single get/find operation, and that method takes as a parameter only the Aggregate unique identity. Further, by design Aggregates don’t have any query methods (getters). As a result, we need another way to query, which generally leads to employing CQRS (discussed previously) hand-in-glove with Event Sourcing.

With MySQL, there is a maximum row width of 65,535 bytes. Again, that’s row width, not column width. If we declare even one column with the maximum VARCHAR column type width of 65,535, there is no space left for one additional column in the table.
Design your data model for the sake of your domain model, not your domain model for the sake of your data model.

Events are a domain-wide concept, not just a concept in a single Bounded Context.

There are several possible ways for remote Bounded Contexts to become aware of Events that occur in your Bounded Context. The primary idea is that some form of messaging takes place, and an enterprise messaging mechanism is needed.

As [Evans] indicates, the consistency of all Aggregate instances other than the one used in the single transaction must be enforced by asynchronous means.

two mechanisms in a messaging solution must always be consistent with each other: the persistence store used by the domain model, and the persistence store backing the messaging infrastructure used to forward the Events published by the model.

Using Domain Events allows any number of your enterprise systems to be designed as autonomous services and systems.

Almost-infinite scalability is achieved by allowing for continuous repartitioning of Aggregate data storage, as explained by Amazon.com’s Pat Helland in his position paper “Life beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate’s Opinion” [Helland]. What we call Aggregate, he calls entity. But what he describes is still an Aggregate by any other name: a unit of composition that has transactional consistency. Some NoSQL persistence mechanisms support the Amazon-inspired distributed storage. These provide much of what [Helland] refers to as the lower, scale-aware layer. When employing a distributed store, or even when using a SQL database with similar motivations, reference by identity plays an important role.

Since the Command objects can be serialized, we can send the textual or binary representations as messages over a message queue. The object that the message is delivered to is a message handler and is to us a Command Handler. The Command Handler effectively replaces the Application Service method, although it is roughly equivalent and may still be referred to as such. Anyway, decoupling the client from the Service can enhance load balancing, enable competing consumers, and support system partitioning