Book-Review

When I first heard that Satya Nadella had a book out, I was somewhat surprised as at the time, he had just taken over running Microsoft. Usually you don’t see books from CEOs until they’ve been in the role for quite a while and have become philosophical about things.

But given the impact I could see he would have, I was fascinated to read his book Hit Refresh.

It was actually quite a bit more than I expected. I really enjoyed the tales of his life and how it led up to his current role.

2018-07-27

Another book I’ve read recently while sitting on a few planes is Blockchain - by Samuel Rees.

I’ve seen some big claims in the titles of books but this one had me intrigued:

The Ultimate Beginner Through Advanced Guide on Everything You Need to Know About Investing in Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Ethereum and the Future of Finance

That’s quite a claim. I was really hoping this book would provide a great amount of detail given it’s ‘beginner through advanced’ guide claim.

2018-07-20

One book that a number of my friends suggested that I read is:

Now I Know: The Revealing Stories Behind the World’s Most Interesting Facts - by Dan Lewis

I wasn’t sure what to make of this book as it just seemed to be a large collection of facts that Dan thought were interesting. Given I love trivia, I thought I’d try it.

Dan started an email list called “Now I know” back in 2010 with a handful of subscribers and grew that to over a hundred thousand. These are basically the topics that ended up being some of the most interesting.

2018-07-13

I have to admit to being a bit of a fan of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, so I was really looking forward to reading or listening (via Audible) to his book Astrophysics for People in  Hurry.

It’s always a bit of a tall order to try to cover something like Astrophysics in a short book. The title reminded of silly book titles like “Applied Multivariate Analysis and Calculus for non-Mathematicians”.

But I loved this book.

2018-07-06

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