With total silence around me and my mind wanting to immerse in a book, I picked up this book from my inventory. I came across a reference to this work in Aaron Brown’s book on Risk Management. First something about the cover: The young woman on the right is the classical Goddess Fortuna, whom today we might call Lady Luck. The young man on the left is Chance. Fortuna is holding an enormous bunch of fruits, symbolizing the good luck that she can bring.

I guess this is almost every TA’s experience(including mine!)

Link : Detailed Book Summary(pdf) Takeaway: Imagine that you were using a clunky and a painful email service and suddenly one day you are shown gmail. Aren’t you thrilled ?. It’s elegant, quick and has a ton intuitive features. I had the same feeling with knitr after having painfully used Sweave for a long time. I am certain that this package will stand out as the goto package for literate programming for a very long time to come because it is elegant, quick and has features that you were always trying to patch in via other packages.

This book is written by Ustad Alauddin Khan’s great grand daughter, Sahana. She narrates the story of Ustad Alauddin Khan piecing together various handwritten manuscripts and stories from her grandparents house. Tracing the family tree, Sahana discovers that Alauddin Khan’s ancestors were actually Hindus. Somewhere along the way, one of his ancestors converted to Islam and married a Muslim. AK’s father was a Sitar player and the music rubbed on to AK from a very young age.

Here is the author’s bio from his website : Tom Heany has been involved with musician his whole life, as a student, a teacher, a player, a writer and, yes, a practicer - for 13,000 hours, give or take a few.For 18 years he was the Director of Programming for the National Music Foundation, where he developed and ran the American Music Education Initiative and the Berkshire Music Festival. As a contributing editor for the National Guitar Workshop, he wrote about musical subjects ranging from the Grammy Awards to Tuvan throat-singing.