Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

Beginning Java 8 Games Development by Wallace Jackson:
This book on the JavaFX libraries is overly verbose without really saying anything useful. It suffers from the technical writing problem where the text ends up describing rather than explaining, which is of no help when you're trying to learn something. A section on what is billed as the most important aspect of the library ends up being an exhaustive list of components and constructor calls without even a single paragraph defining the concept or explaining when you'd ever use it. There's a single chapter which tries to teach the entire Java programming language, which is so short and dense (and imperfect) that it feels like the author was paid by the word.

Final Grade: D

Newsroom, Season Three:
The final season of Newsroom is fun and well-written, right up to the series finale episode, which is pointless and gratuitously long. The season is over quickly though, so it's worth watching for series completeness.

Final Grade: B

Orphan Black, Season Three:
This is a fairly hit-or-miss season, held afloat only by how enjoyable it is to watch Tatiana Maslany play so many different roles at the same time. The first half of the season is simultaneously too exposition-heavy and plot-light, with a desert set that looks like cast off remnants from a high school production of Homeland. The most enjoyable sections of this season focus on the Alison character in an unrelated sideplot, which is indicative of how unnecessarily complicated the story became. However, the plot corrects itself and thins out nicely towards the end, wrapping up without unnecessary cliffhangers.

Final Grade: B-

Silicon Valley, Season One:
With only 8 half-hour episodes, this show from the creator of Office Space is over too soon. It's a charming skewering of the San Francisco startup scene which was done previously (but not quite as well) with the Amazon original, Betas. The technical jargon rings true and is obviously well-researched, but it's still possible to enjoy the show without being a software engineer. The show is fairly self-aware and sometimes borders on too much absurdity, but it's consistently funny and has several lines that will probably end up as pop culture quotes in the coming years.

Final Grade: A-