Lots of book reviews to catch up on, so I’m going to do capsule reviews until I’m caught up. Balance of Trade, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller I really like the Liaden universe books, but hadn’t gotten around to reading the new books in the universe. When I saw this one in the library, […]
Category: reviews
Reassembling the Social, by Bruno Latour
Amazon link I finally finished the Latour, about a month after starting it, which is about how long it took me to read his previous book, The Politics of Nature. It’s a hard book to review; the goal of the book is to explain actor-network theory, which Latour co-created based on the social studies of […]
Purple Cow, by Seth Godin
Book website After reading Survival Is Not Enough, I figured I would go ahead and pick up another of his books since it was in the office library. This was another very quick read, with one good idea. To wit, Godin suggests that it is no longer good enough to have an outstanding message or […]
The Career Programmer, by Christopher Duncan
Amazon link Another book from the Joel reading list. Subtitled Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World, this is a book by a career programmer on how to survive in the corporate world. Having spent eight years as a software developer in a variety of corporate environments, I was curious to see how much these tactics […]
The Art of Project Management, by Scott Berkun
Amazon link I first learned of Scott Berkun last year, when I followed a link to one of his essays and found it thoughtful and well-written. I started reading his blog, joined his mailing list. and kept my eyes out for new content from him. So when I saw his book, The Art of Project […]
Survival Is Not Enough, by Seth Godin
Book site Technically, this isn’t on Joel’s list, but he knows Seth, and several of Godin’s other books are on the shelf in the Fog Creek Library, so I’m counting it under a technicality. I happened to pick up this particular book a year ago in San Francisco from the discount rack in a book […]
Direct from Dell, by Michael Dell
Amazon link I was kind of skeptical of this book when Joel handed it to me, but it was surprisingly good. It doesn’t have any original ideas, and didn’t change how I think, but the book was well-written (apparently by Catherine Fredman) and did a good job of describing how Dell had taken some basic […]
Getting to Yes, by Fisher and Ury
Amazon link This is a classic book on negotiation, introducing the theory of principled negotiation. The idea is that most negotiations tend to become positional negotiations fairly quickly; I offer a book for sale for $20, you offer me $10, I go $18, you go $12, we end up at $15. Positional negotiations make sense […]
The Only Sustainable Edge, by Hagel and Brown
As I mentioned last month, I was reading this book mostly because I enjoyed The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid so much. I finally finished it off last weekend, and figured I should at least do a perfunctory review. It was pretty awful. The writing was terrible – I […]
Positioning, by Ries and Trout
Amazon link This is a classic book in marketing, and therefore one of the books that Joel asked us to read. The main message of the book is that consumers have a limited mindspace. They can only pay attention to a certain number of things before they just lose track and don’t care any more. […]
