Books by John Collins

An illuminating exploration of the Bible and many of our most contentious contemporary issues

Classical economics suggests that market economies are self-correcting in times of recession or depression, and tend toward full employment and output. But English economist John Maynard Keynes disagrees. In his ground-breaking 1936 study The General Theory, Keynes argues that traditional economics has misunderstood the causes of unemployment.

200 years after it was written, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations is still debated by governments internationally. Smith argued that 'mercantilism'-the theory that the national economy exists solely to strengthen the government, thus the government should regulate the economy-was wrong.

Noam Chomsky is one of the influential thinkers of the twentieth-century. His work in linguistics, philosophy and political theory has spanned six decades, and has been met with critical acclaim and controversy in equal measure. This book is not only an introduction to Chomsky's theoretical writings, but also a critical engagement with his work.

SIMPL (Synchronous Interprocess Messaging Project for Linux) is discussed at many different levels. At its most fundamental, SIMPL is a set of library functions which allow the passing of encapsulated messages between cooperating processes. On another level, SIMPL is an active open source project which began over a decade ago. Over the years this project has accumulated an extensive body of sample code and extensions. SIMPL is also a great way to design software applications where complexity is encapsulated in separate, easily testable, readily extendable modules. The current state of software development is compared to the hardware world before the advent of integrated circuit chips. The term softwareIC is coined to describe the software equivalent of the integrated circuit. The SIMPL toolkit, along with tokenized messaging and the SIMPL testing framework is shown to be a great way to build these softwareICs. Several are illustrated throughout the book.

Based on extensive interviews with members of the "intifada generation," those who were between 10 and 18 years old when the intifada began in 1987, this book provides a detailed look at the intifada memories of ordinary Palestinians.