Another book that I’ve been listing to lately on Audible is Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.
This was a very timely book for me. I find it very easy to get endlessly bogged down in minutia, rather than just always focusing on the big picture of what I’m doing. It’s really easy to do that if you have a great desire to get things perfect or close to perfect. But that’s not what you should be aiming for.
2018-06-29
I’ve been reading and/or listening to a lot of books again lately and one that I didn’t have high expectations for, but ended up really liking was Donald Miller’s Building a Story Brand.
If you are a business owner, I’d suggest listening to it or reading it. It takes a really refreshing approach of what he calls using a story brand framework.
When you need to tell someone what your business does, how do you describe that?
2018-06-22
I missed out on getting a copy of this book when Ed Katibah (aka Spatial Ed) was giving them out at his spatial session at a recent conference but I made a mental note to buy a copy and read it. I’ve finally got to do so.
This is a truly excellent book. I think the title belies the contents. I hadn’t been in a hurry to read it as I thought it would just be a “beginner” level book on using spatial data in SQL Server 2008. How wrong I was. This book covers so much of what you need to know to make effective use of spatial data. It spends time on explaining spatial concepts, proceeds to describe the data types and later thoroughly covers all the methods offered by the types. But the real bonus is the in depth coverage of how to use the spatial types in a practical way. Alastair spends time covering geocoding data, building a SQLCLR-based function for geocoding, building procs to return data, building a web handler to offer spatial feeds, building mashups with both GoogleMaps and VirtualEarth using the feeds, etc.
2009-09-30
I caught up with James Luetkehoelter at the PASS Summit in Germany a few months back. He sent me a copy of his new book from APress: Pro SQL Server Disaster Recovery .
I managed to finish reading it while heading back from CodeCampSA in Adelaide today (which was a good solid event again - excellent work Peter Griffiths!). I quite enjoyed the book and I like James’ writing style. It’s quite conversational and I could hear him talking to me as I read it.
2008-07-13
There are a number of key books that I’ve missed reading over the years, in areas that interest me. Recently, I’ve been fixing that. One that is always discussed is The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit by Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite from the Kimball Group.
I would have to say I enjoyed reading it. It is a large book at over 700 pages and a couple of inches thick so it took a while to get through.
2008-07-09
I’ve heard a lot of praise for Scott Ambler’s book: Database Refactoring: Evolutionary Database Design over the past few years. It’s another relatively classic book that I’ve been slow to read.
I often mentioned to people that when I was at a software design review meeting for Microsoft around the DataDude product (Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals), I noticed that Sachin Rekhi from the team was walking around with a copy of this book under his arm. As Sachin was responsible for the refactorings to go into the product and there was only one refactoring (rename) at the time, I thought that was a good sign for where the product might head. I wasn’t aware that he had been a contributor to the book. Sachin wrote some of the opening details.
2008-06-07
I haven’t posted up any book reviews recently so it’s time to catch up a bit. For some reason, it had taken me ages to get to read Kalen’s latest book in the Inside SQL Server series: Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 - Query Tuning and Optimization .
As expected, it’s a great piece of work. I very much enjoyed the chapters written by other authors as well, particulary those from Adam Machanic and Craig Freedman. Ron Talmage, Sunil Agarwal and Lubor Kollar have also made strong contributions to this work.
2008-06-07
This is another one of those books I picked up in an airport when I ran out of reading material while travelling. One of the key criteria I applied when choosing the book was whether or not I’d finish reading it by the time we landed. We had a bit of a delay boarding so I’d definitely finished it by the time we’d landed. It’s in the quick reads series and it is just that.
2008-06-07
I was on a flight from Houston to Washington via Dallas today. We seemed to sit forever on the tarmac in Dallas, in fact just over 1.5 hours from leaving gate to taking off. It was amazingly silly. The captain warened us that if he had to stop and restart the engines one more time, we’d have had to return to the terminal for more fuel. And we hadn’t even left.
2008-03-31
