I recently listened to Your Best Year Ever by Michael Hyatt on Audible.
When the book started with The Best is Yet to Come being announced loudly, I nearly stopped listening. I can’t get the look of Kimberly Guilfoyle screaming that, out of my head.
The way she did that was like an excerpt from a horror movie. She has ruined that phrase for me, for all time.
2025-01-28
I recently watched a YouTube video with Ali Abdaal that talked about productivity. Not sure what it was exactly, but I really liked listening to Ali. So I was pleased to find that his book Feel-Good Productivity was available on Audible.
I really liked this book. I found Ali great to listen to and compelling in his story. It’s another one where I really also appreciate that he narrated the book himself.
2025-01-24
I’m a long-term fan of Annabel Crab and her work. So I was pleased to get a chance to listen to a book she wrote a while back, called The Wife Drought: Why Women Need Wives and Men Need Lives. It didn’t disappoint.
There was an old adage that behind every successful man, there was an awesome woman. That’s a view that needs updated wording, but it’s true that the people who really get ahead in the world, have a supportive partner who fits the role that wives traditionally did. And still today, that’s mostly still wives in that role not husbands, even though that proportion is slowly changing.
2025-01-08
A while back, I received another book from my friends at PackT. It was A Developer’s Guide to Cloud Apps Using Microsoft Azure by Hamida Rebai Trabelsi. I have been meaning to get a chance to read it, and I finally did.
I don’t know Hamida. I think I need to add her to my LinkedIn contacts though, as she clearly has similar interests in many areas. Hamida is a fellow MVP from Tunisia and currently working in Canada. Her MVP award was for developer technologies.
2024-12-16
I’ve had a busy time reading books lately. Another one from my friends at PackT that looked interesting to me was Database Design and Modeling with PostgreSQL and MySQL: Build efficient and scalable databases for modern applications using open source databases by Alkin Tezuysal and Ibrar Ahmed.
Database design and modeling is a passion of mine and, while most of my time in recent years has been spent on the SQL Server side of the fence, I’m always involved in PostgreSQL projects, and occasionally with MySQL. Each database has “a way of doing things” that’s considered best practices. MySQL has never been a database engine that I’m keen on, but with tools like WordPress, it’s always been part of some projects.
2024-10-02
Another book that I’ve been sent for review lately, was a pre-release edition of Data Visualization with Microsoft Power BI by Alex Kolokolov and Maxim Zelensky. It looks like it’s released now.
I’ve known Alex for many years, and have acted as a judge in his UI competition each year. He has a flair for data visualization. In the book, he mentioned that he was initially puzzled by many people finding it hard. But noted that “I later discovered that for experienced analysts and data engineers, visualization was entirely unnecessary. They comprehend the data structure, and the relationships are evident to them simply through tables. They genuinely don’t understand the need for all these pie charts and graphs.”
2024-09-18
I had some clear time this morning so I read a recent book called Deciphering Data Architectures (Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh) by James Serra.
One comment I need to make is that for some reason, the O’Reilly titles seem to have become more expensive lately, and their freight options are expensive too. It was the same for this book. It was $112 AUD landed at my place. That’s so much more than any similar book that I’ve read lately, and this is not a large book.
2024-08-15
I recently received another eBook for review from our friends at PackT. This time it was an early release copy of the Third Edition of the Microsoft Power BI Cookbook by Greg Deckler and Brett Powell.
I’m a fan of books written in a cookbook style, rather than a teaching style. Often, people already know the basics and just want to get prompted on how to do specific tasks.
2024-08-03
Another book that I was recently sent for review by the PackT people was Web API Development with ASP.NET Core 8: Learn techniques, patterns, and tools for building high-performance, robust, and scalable web APIs.
The author is Xiaodi Yan, who is a fellow longer-term Microsoft MVP and an experienced software developer, focussing on .NET, AI, DevOps and all things cloud-related. You’ll also find him on LinkedIn Learning as an instructor.
2024-04-25
The people at PackT recently sent me a book to review, and I was happy to do so as it was on a topic that’s dear to my heart: Azure Data Factory. The book was Azure Data Factory Cookbook and it’s the second edition of the book. The authors are Dmitry Foshin, Tonya Chernyshova, Dmitry Anoshin, and Xenia Ireton.
In the past, I wasn’t keen on PackT books. When they first appeared, they tended to be low cost books from unknown authors, many of whom struggled with writing in English, and pretty poor editing of the content.
2024-04-20
