Tagged "book"

I recently read Remote: Office Not Required by David Heinemeier-Hansson (who created Ruby on Rails) and Jason Fried (who co-founded 37 Signals with Heinemeier-Hansson). This book is really a case study in why the future of work will be remote, of which the book did convince me (but I would say, I already believed).

The book is really structured to convince those who do not believe in the premise of the title. It talks about many successful companies who have transformed themselves to work remotely fully and large corporations who save lots of money on office space (IBM, being one example).

I recently read O’Reilly Building Maintainable Software (Java Edition). It provides good insight as to what to look for to create maintainability in enterpise software systems.

10 suggestions the book provides:

1. Write shorter units
2. Write simpler units (measured in Cyclomatic Complexity)
3. Write code once only
4. Keep interfaces very small
5. Seperate code in to modules
6. Couple modules loosely
7. Keep modules evenly sized
8. Keep codebase small (and look for ways to right-size)
9. Automate development pipeline and your tests
10. Write clean code and refactor as you go

Overall I thought the book was very well laid out, easy to read and easy to understand. I’d recommend it to anyone new to software development, but most of the tips contained within the book should be very familiar to the seasoned developer.

I recently finished reading Steve Jobs, the biography by Walter Isaacson. I can’t add much more then the extensive coverage that it has recieved in the press to date. Instead I paraphrase really badly a friend of mine, Noel Hudson:

All that book thought me was dropping acid and treating people really badly works as a life strategy.

While that’s not entirely true it is a humourous look at the books tone. It has a grain of truth, Walter Issacson really focuses on the warts and all representation of Steve Jobs. He defines him very much in terms of how other people percieved him, whether that should have been the mainstay of the book is up for debate. Overall it’s a good book, what I liked most is the history lessons of the creation of the mac and how the Disney/Pixar relationship went down before the merger. I also felt Walter Issacson left it hanging at the end and that he knows much more that he can’t publish due to Apple’s corporate strategy being tied to Jobs so much (like the comment he made about cracking the UI for a TV).

The Ubuntu Book (2nd Edition) is a nicely put together book for dealing with the Linux operating system in a number of clearly laid out and well presented chapters. Chapters are as follows:

1. Introducing Ubuntu
2. Installing Ubuntu
3. Using Ubuntu on the Desktop
4. Advanced Usage and Managing Ubuntu
5. Ubuntu Server
6. Support / Typical Problems
7. Using Kubuntu
8. Ubuntu Community
9. Ubuntu-Related Projects
10. Using Edubuntu

This book is a very complete introduction and contains suprising elements related to finding out and joining the community of users - which you will not find in other Ubuntu Books (such as O’Reilly’s Ubuntu Hacks) which make it a unique and worthwhile addition to any Ubuntu users personal library. It is most helpful to new users to Ubuntu, which sections on installing and help with problems that could be faced. Having said that, it falls short on the amount of truly unique information that it contains - most of the books contents can be found on the web. What you are paying for is a well-laid out, well written account of the Ubuntu-sphere and all that goes along with it.