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Currently Reading
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Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information: A masterpiece but unwieldly at 9" by 11" making it very hard to read while balancing a baby on your lap. It's also hard to study the illustrations with only a dim reading light so I may never actually finish this book. Most people buy Tufte's books to have them on the coffee table anyway so why should I be any different.. p.s. this book is definitely not baby proof. |
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Richard Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: Paperback + short stories = very readable with Derek. |
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Lawrence Putnam and Ware Myers's Measures For Excellence Excellent hard-core book on software scheduling. Should be required reading for all development and program managers. Weighty enough to be an effective weapon to use against marketing types if they're not smart enough to understand the math. Along with all the science, it is littered with great quotes like "People who believe in schedules based on nothing more than their own wishes deserve what they get". |
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Business
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Jim Collin's Good to Great: An exploration of why some companies become great and why other's suck. A thought-provoking read - seems like a bad idea to use shareholder return as the only success metric though due to the high risk of being "Enron'd" |
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Carl Shapiro's Information Rules: One of the few good books I've read that explores strategies for establishing or preventing technology lock-in through innovation, standard-setting, market-pacing, IP control and other methods. After you've read this book you will either feel totally cynical about intellectual property development or you'll want to run out and try some of the strategies ... or perhaps both. |
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Adrian Slywotzky's Value Migration: Thought provoking read that examines the sometimes surprising effects of paradigm shifts. I have to admit that i read the first chapter and then skimmed faster and faster through the rest. |
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Andy Grove's Only the Paranoid Survive: Strategic inflection points and how to deal with them At 200 pages, this is a relatively short book for it's category making it pretty easy to read while holding Derek. |
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Software and Technology
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Steven Levy's Crypto: The story of modern cryptography - so why is it published in plain-text? The book paints an unflattering picture of both government and commercial sector manipulation of intellectual property rights |
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Michael Cusumano's Microsoft Secrets: A no-nonsense examination of hard-learned best practices at Microsoft during the heyday of command and control software development. Should be required reading for commercial software developers but, for the most part, if they've worked at Microsoft they already know this stuff and if they haven't then they usually have too big a chip on their shoulders to be objective about the boys in Redmond. Apparently Cusumano is coming out with a new book on creating platforms at Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco ... should be interesting. |
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Parenting
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Stephanie Brill's Queer Parent's Primer There are more of us than you think. Welcome to the Gayby Boom! |
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Other
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David Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: An amazing book but has anyone actually had the stamina to read it cover to cover or do most people read the first 100 pages and then skim the rest so that they can talk about it at parties? |
