 | Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is author: Donald C. Gause; Gerald M. Weinberg asin: 0932633161 binding: Paperback list price: $13.95 USD amazon price: $12.55 USD |
A great book on problem solving. People that have seen me speak about how visually expressive and visually explicit models are compared to how ambiguous and vague the written word can be, will recognize the "Mary had a little lamb" example from this book. Anything written by Weinberg is worth reading.
 | Transaction Processing, First Edition : Concepts and Techniques (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data author: Jim Gray Andreas Reuter asin: 1558601902 binding: Hardcover list price: $137.00 USD amazon price: $104.00 USD |
The book on the topic from the masterful Jim Gray. One of my pet rants is the complete lack of understanding and hence implementation of ACID. From Banks (big ones too) that have mainframe code with no concurrency control whatsover to silver-bullet persistence frameworks that were first published without any concurrency control whatsoever to collaborative or shared editing solutions that were shipped without any concurrency control whatsoever and... well you get the point. This stuff is well understood and well experimented and measured. Don't go try and figure out locking yourself. Don't just do ovine optimistic locking. Go read how this stuff is actually done. Start with failfast, learn the two-phase locking theorem, get on board with idempotence, be the first on your block to get this stuff right. Ok, ok, end of rant.
 | Crossing the Chasm author: Geoffrey A. Moore asin: 0060517123 binding: Paperback list price: $17.95 USD amazon price: $12.21 USD |
The first ediiton of this book is also great. One of the really insightful books about high tech marketing.
 | Peak Performance: Aligning the Hearts and Minds of Your Employees author: Jon R. Katzenbach asin: 0875849369 binding: Hardcover list price: $35.00 USD amazon price: $23.10 USD |
What a breath of fresh air. Now here's a novel idea: the list of good things to do is almost endless and any of us could start making such a list. The things on it will almost all have merit individually. The trick then is this: which subset of all those "good things to do" is the right subset to apply for my organization? Katzenbach has gone out and studied successful organizations and classified them. He has then studied the subsets of "good things to do" for each organization classiifcation. Brilliant! This book puts a TON of other management and HR books in their place.
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One of the most popular discussions during my workshops is What books should we read?It's not a formal workshop topic, but it almost always makes it on the ratholes list. Meaning - people are often asking where to go to learn more. I usually ask how many of the students have read more than 3 books this year? Then 2 books and then just 1. Sadly, what is common is that many hands are not raised. I then ask the students If you haven't read any books this year, how are you learning?Books are not the only way to learn, but they offer a breadth and depth of varied learning opportunities that are unmatched. Unfortunately, the hit rate (what is good versus what isn't) for books is not very good. However, in these lists you can get just those books that I know are worth reading. In some cases, a book is recommended just for a small section or just a few chapters - but it is still really worth it. Books are categorized and may appear in multiple categories. I don't waste a lot of words or your time here with reviews. In fact, some books have no review at all. |
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 | The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, 20th Anniversary Edition author: Frederick P. Brooks asin: 0201835959 |
Chad Dickerson at Infoworld has an article on the top 20 I.T. mistakes to avoid. You can read the multi-page article by clicking here.
This is number 9 from his list.
In his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick Brooks posited that planning software-development projects based on per-unit “man-months” ultimately does not work due to the unique nature of software development.
Even if the building of software could be broken into easily managed, interchangeable time units, the vast productivity difference between the best coders and merely average ones means IT managers might get their best work out of fewer, but more talented, programmers doing their work in less time.
Hello,
I am new to this discussion board, so I am going to shortly introduce myself first.
My name is Ivica Aracic, I am a research assistant in the Software Modularity Lab at Darmstadt University of Technology.
Recently I am working on a development methodology for the aspect oriented language CaesarJ (http://caesarj.org).
FDD seems to me like a very promissing starting point for my work, since its feature-driven organizational structure is pretty much compatible with the concept of aspects in AOP. Indeed one could say features are aspects of the considered system.
 | A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development (The Coad Series) author: Stephen R. Palmer,John M. Felsing asin: 0130676152 |
Hugh Walcott inttroduced himself to me in New Zealand on a recent roadshow I was doing for Borland. He handed me a copy of this article from CIO magazine.
A correction though. The book A Practical Guide... was not written by me or Peter. Steve Palmer is the lead author of that book.
Hi,
I like to thank Jeff for a great week of FDD workshops in Wellington / New Zealand. I enjoyed.
Many thanks,
Darya
Somebody makes existing FDD use to carry through maintenance of softwares already and not in new projects?
