The Night Eternal by del Toro and Hogan

"The Night Eternal" is the last book in the Strain Trilogy and I was really looking forward to a strong ending to cap off what has been a great story. Instead I got a pseudo-religious anticlimax.
How the story ends is no great surprise (although there is always a slim chance that an author will either let the bad guys win or extract an extraordinary price from the good guys), but, in my mind, having an obvious ending puts a lot of pressure on the authors to make getting to the end good.
Instead the authors spent a lot of time going into the backstory of how vampires came to exist, building a case for Mr. Quinlan being a Jesus figure, and Eph being the hand of God. All of this gets in the way of a tight storyline and spending more time on how people react under an oppressive occupation. It also gets in the way of any character development.
The two year interlude between the action in book two and the beginning of book three has changed the characters. The change is mostly in Eph and because the changes fit in with the character's basic disposition, they don't require much explanation. Fet and Nora have also changed, but their changes don't really fit with the characters as laid out in the first two books. Little is done to smooth this over either. The reader is just left to accept it.
That said, the book is not a bad read. There are some excellent fight scenes and the writing is excellent. The mythology is not uninteresting.
If you have read the first two books, you should read this one as well. I found it disappointing, but not without merit. My sense of disappointment is likely just a matter of taste for the direction the authors took the story. I'm less interested in religious mythology and more interested in social critique.

Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst

I downloaded this book from Apple because it sounded interesting and it was free. It is not the sort of book I would pay money to read. The description made it clear that this was a book with something to sell.
Bit literacy is the product and Hurst's company will gladly sell it to your company for a hefty fee. I don't begrudge Hurst for this or think any less of him, but I don't ever feel like paying for a marketing tool.
It turns out that the book has some good stuff in it. It also doesn't shy away from offering up details on using the system. So, if you are buried under bits(e-mail, photos, power points, etc) it may be worth paying a few
bucks.
The key to the whole system is rooted in standard productivity lore. Let the unimportant stuff vanish so you can focus on getting things done. Don't keep ten pictures of the same thing; only keep the best one. Don't save every scrap of e-mail because it buries the stuff you need to save.
Hurst is a proponent of inbox zero. You should empty your inbox at least once a day. E-mails are either junk to be discarded, to do items that need to be tracked, or information to b stored in an appropriate place. The inbox is not a place to keep to do items or information.
One other discussion I found interesting was the discussion of file formats for textual data. Hurst comes right out and says that Word, and its ilk, are never the proper choice for sharing text. He prefers plain text unless you require formatting. If formatting is required he prefers PDF.
Bit Literacy has some interesting ideas for writers as well. Hurst has a whole section on how to write in a bit literate manner. Basically it is all about front loading the point and brevity. Write in a way that respects that the reader is busy. This is not about pleasure it is about efficiency.
Hurst's book has some worthwhile points. There is something in there for anyone who uses a computer.