Book-Review

My friends at PackT recently sent me a review copy of fellow MVP Greg Deckler’s third edition of Learn Microsoft Power BI . It’s not released yet but is available for pre-order.

Production quality and additional resources

The book is written well and the copy and tech editing seem well handled.

I was particularly impressed to see that Art Tennick was a tech reviewer. I regularly mention Art’s books. I like the way he presents recipe style books. He did it with MDX and again with DAX. Many people don’t want a detailed coverage of a language, just a series of recipes on how to use it. That’s what some of Art’s books provide.

2025-07-01

I recently read another Mandarin Companion book called Great Expectations Part 1 adapted by John Pasden from the Charles Dickens original book.

I love these books.

John Pasden is well-known to anyone who’s been learning Mandarin for any length of time. He was one of the presenters at ChinesePod over the years. He set up a company called Mandarin Companion that produces graded readers.

If you haven’t seen graded readers (in any language), they are reading books that limit the scope of the target language to a particular set of words (or in this case characters).

2025-06-27

I was intrigued to see a book called Don’t Give Your Work Away for Free by Thaddeus Cooper and Dr Frederick Von Greensburg. I thought I should check it out.

The authors start out by discussing how employment typically works today. You have a timeline to do work, you go there for the time, and you are paid for going there.

While I have done that sort of work over the years, it’s certainly not how I prefer to work. I far prefer a project value basis where I determine with the client what needs to be done, work out the value that it will provide, and provide them with a price to achieve that outcome. How and when I get that done is then up to me.

2025-06-23

I decided I’d like to have a greater understanding of some medical topics. One of the areas I’ve been looking into is Cardiology.

I was looking around to find some books that explain it and I stumbled upon A Concise Summary of Cardiology by Kevin Carson .

For a tough topic, I was surprised that the book was so short.

The problem that I found with the book is that it’s not really for me. Instead of explaining the concepts, it’s really a how to guide for people who are studying for work in cardiology.

2025-05-26

Over the years, one area that I have a great interest in, and yet I think gets nowhere near the right amount of attention is API design. So I was really interested to hear fellow MVP Valerio De Sanctis’ ideas in the new book Building Web APIs With ASP.NET Core .

API Design and Standards

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to work with poorly designed APIs. It affects me when working with data, but also affects almost every aspect of computing.

2025-05-14

Over the years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time teaching core computing concepts. When I was teaching at universities, there were a few “go-to” books that I liked to use. One such book was Structured Computer Organization by Andrew Tanenbaum and Todd Austin. I recently noticed that it was now in its 6th edition, so I thought it was time to revisit it.

The book was designed to be used in university courses. I’m not sure what the current setup is, but I noticed on Amazon that it was a crazy high price, yet it was also available for direct download from a university GitHub repository. I couldn’t seem to work out if that was intentional or not, so I won’t link to it.

2025-05-03

I’ve known Soheil Bakhshi for a while now and was keen to review the second edition of his new book: Expert Data Modeling with Power BI . Our friends at PackT sent me a review copy.

Data Modeling

The data modeling that’s needed for good Power BI outcomes is something that’s dear to my heart, and I was keen to see what Soheil had to say, and where I agreed or disagreed.

2025-05-01

I’ve been a fan of Seth Godin for such a long time. I recently read Small is the New Big: And Other (Little) Ideas That Change Everything . Once again, I’m glad I read it.

One thing I’ve learned over decades of giving presentations, is that you can present all the detail you want, but the thing that the attendees will remember, are the stories and anecdotes that you deliver. Seth is a master of story telling.

2025-04-29

I’m an unashamed fan of Bill Bryson. His ability to see through the fog of any topic, and to make sense of it all, is unsurpassed. I also find his writing very funny. The strange thing is he doesn’t come across that way in person. I’ve never understood that. I’ve seen interviews with him where he comes across as really flat, yet his writing is just amazing.

I’m also a fan of understanding more about language. So I was really pleased to get to read his book Made in America which is subtitled as An Informal History of American English. He published this back in 2016 and it’s been on my list for a while.

2025-04-26

I’ve been meaning to write about this book for quite a while. Complete Showplan Operators by Fabiano Amorim is a wonderful book, and a great example of the books that our friends at Red-Gate have made available for free, over the years, as part of their Simple Talk series.

Clearly, reading execution plans in detail isn’t for everyone, but any developer working with SQL Server should be across much of this content.

2025-04-24