Free electronic book: Thinking in Java, 2nd Edition. I started to go through the first edition of this book sometime last year. Now I think I'm ready to dig in for real. If only there was a free/cheap Java IDE that suited my tastes...
A great interview (Dr. Dobbs Journal, Feb 98) with Larry Wall, creater of Perl.
A couple of Larry Wall quotes, from the 3rd State of the Perl Onion:
You know, behavior can be reduced to biology, biology can be reduced to biochemistry, and biochemistry can be reduced to chemistry. Chemistry, in turn, can be reduced to physics. And physics, of course, can be reduced to theology.
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Actually, as a linguist, I don't believe in etymological meanings. The meanings of words depend on many contexts, but all of the real contexts are in the present language, and true etymology is only in the past. On the other hand, part of the current context is what you think the etymology of a word is. That's why people like me keep trotting out etymological arguments, even though they're relatively meaningless, not to mention wrong half the time.