Books

February was a busy month, full of events. Thus, I did not manage to complete any book to place in this section. However, I’m closing in one pretty nice book I will certainly put in this section in the next issue, so stay tuned.

Articles

• Thoughts on Markdown - this article describes the history of Markdown, including the creation of various dialects of this language. The text presents the reasons why Markdown fails to be a universal language for content creators in the age of the modern web and why it found its place among developers. This article also describes the features that would be required for the new format to answer the needs of the contemporary web pages.
• On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules - this paper compares two approaches to the modularization of computer systems. The former is based on the flowchart representing processing that happens in the system. In this approach, one step becomes one module. The latter strategy is based on the design decisions that were made. Each module should encapsulate one such decision and hide it from the other parts of the system. While both of those approaches have their own strengths and weaknesses, the decision-based criteria are more likely to survive the changes of the made decisions.